Category: Ecology & Environment

This post is part of this week’s featured projects about water quality monitoring. Take a look! Despite over 70% of the Earth’s surface being covered in water, one in nine people do not have access to an improved water source.(1) Contaminated water kills more people than all wars, crimes and terrorism combined yet more people […]

Here at SciStarter, we’re learning something new every day. Last month, when we featured the World Water Monitoring Challenge as a great citizen science project for the classroom, we learned about World Water Monitoring Day. This is celebrated on September 18th and brings people together from around the globe to help keep an eye on our […]

That’s right–it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. It’s Shark Week, and SciStarter has a slew of projects for you to try out. Let’s see if you bite. Whether it’s fascination or fear, the sight of a shark makes our hearts skip a beat. Thanks to these featured citizen science projects, that sight can also […]

SciStarter brings you curated citizen science projects under new themes on a bi-weekly basis. Be sure to check out the other “DNA Barcoding” featured projects for this cycle! Have you ever wanted to know how many different species of creepy crawlies you can spot in a weekend? ‘Biotrailers’ are doing just that at the Mount […]

Calling all water monitoring groups! It is time for the annual Secchi Dip-In. From now until July 22, volunteer and professional water monitoring groups are being asked to take transparency measurements in a local body of water. A secchi disk is a common tool for measuring water turbidity, or water cloudiness. Turbidity is caused by […]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is on a new mission: to encourage citizen scientists to learn more about the air, water, and resources around them. Earlier this year, the EPA’s Region 2 office announced its newest tool, MyEnvironment. This project provides immediate access to a cross-section of environmental data for any geographical location in the […]

This post originally appeared on Your Wildlife and was reposted with the permission of the author, Holly Menninger. Over the last few weeks, we’ve watched and envied reports and photos coming from those of you living within the emergence zone of Brood II 17-year periodical cicadas (from Georgia to Connecticut). We even traveled westward to […]

SciStarter asked Craig Newmark (of Craigslist fame) why he likes squirrels. He told us that it all started with a simple desire to feed birds. But the suet palaces he was using to dispense the raw, fat-based bird food were constantly getting hacked by squirrels. He tried everything; he even upgraded to “squirrel-resistant” models, to […]

See that partridge in a pear tree? Make sure you count it for Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count, one of the largest and longest running citizen science projects in existence today. It’s a 112 year tradition, with upwards of 60,000 person-days of effort and more than 60 million birds counted each year. “Each of the citizen […]

With  Hurricane Sandy looming large, weather’s the nation’s top news story.  In case you’re at home sitting out the storm like the bulk of the SciStarter team, we’ve got you covered (no pun intended) with plenty of weather-related citizen science opportunities to help researchers and advance science. Bonus: here’s a weather-appropriate, musical supplement to your […]