Category: Ecology & Environment

Next week, we celebrate the halfway point of Citizen Science Month! Join us for a 12- hour nonstop Palooza of Zooniverse Projects! Pick your favorite project and hop online with a SciStarter Team Member. The rest of the week, we count bats, chat with dolphins, observe the weather, and try a whole slew of projects supported […]

A study led by researchers at the University of Maine spearheaded a new approach to finding where ticks love to lurk. The Maine Forest Tick Survey trained hundreds of woodland owners in Maine to systematically comb their properties for disease-toting ticks to discern how forest management may influence the pest’s prevalence. Ticks pose a growing […]

Introduction Hundreds of delegates from around the world converged at Arizona State University (ASU) for the Citizen Science Association’s C*Sci 2023 conference, May 22-26, 2023 to exchange knowledge and help shape and advance opportunities to engage the public in scientific research. Summarizing a week of action-packed days in a single blog post won’t convey the […]

When you make citizen science observations, you might enter the information into an app, take a photo or answer a few questions in an online form and hit submit. That might be the end of your part of the process, but submitting a data point is just the first step in the long, rigorous journey […]

Have you ever considered exploring strange new worlds? Maybe seeking out new life and new civilizations? And then abandoned the idea because you’re too young or too old to seriously consider going boldly where no one has gone before? Well, these are completely achievable goals and they don’t require working your way through Star Fleet […]

Whenever you’re out frolicking in a winter wonderland, why not take a frolicking break every now and then to measure snow depth for your friends at the Community Snow Observations project? Your observations will help them verify data obtained from satellites and other remote sensing tools, and also fill in both spatial and temporal gaps […]

Looking for a special gift for the citizen science lover in your life? You’ve come to the right place! In this podcast, we share expert picks for over a dozen unique gifts your friends and family will enjoy while they help scientists conduct important research. Listen: https://citscipod.podbean.com/e/scistarter-holiday-gift-guide-live/ Projects and websites featured in this episode include: […]

Listen to the podcast: https://citscipod.podbean.com/e/the-great-north-american-fungiquest/ Thousands of mycophiles took to the forest in October to document as many mushrooms as they could, as part of the first annual Great North American FungiQuest. In this podcast, we spoke with Robert Courteau, project creator and also founder of the non-profit group Think Fungi. Projects and other links […]

This fall, between September 15 and October 15, more than 30,000 volunteers combed through forests, fields and even their own backyards in search of the humble mushroom. They were participating in the Great North American FungiQuest, a massive bioblitz that aimed to find and identify as many fungi as possible in the span of just […]

In the United States, it is estimated that more than one million vertebrate animals are killed by vehicle collisions every day. Yet, despite the ubiquity of roadkill, there is actually little comprehensive data on how many animals are killed by cars every year. The U.S. has no national database for roadkill, and most states don’t […]