Category: Ecology & Environment

By Cora Lund Preston, Communication Specialist for Monarch Joint Venture The Monarch Monitoring Blitz has begun! Grab your hats, sunscreen and clipboards and join fellow citizen scientists for some fresh air and an international monarch monitoring blitz from July 29-August 5th! With enough reports, your information will provide a snapshot that helps scientists understand the range […]

River Keeper. Watershed Keeper. There’s something poetic—maybe a bit Celtic—about these terms, which in the world of citizen science refer to someone monitoring a waterway for soil erosion, contaminants, and loss of biodiversity. Across the United States, with sonorous names like Willamette River Keepers and Chattahoochee River Keepers, citizen scientists are keeping watch over the […]

This April, The Crowd & The Cloud brings you a 4-part public television series exploring citizen science, crowdsourcing, and mobile technology. You’ll find the SciStarter Project Finder on The Crowd & The Cloud website to help viewers of the show become do-ers of science!  Below we’ve highlighted each episode and related projects to jump start […]

The United States Endangered Species Act is often considered to be the most powerful piece of environmental legislation not just in the US, but in the world. As a result, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) formally lists a species as either threatened or endangered, it can be a game-changer for the species […]

By Lishka Arata, Conservation Educator at Point Blue Despite the current administration’s efforts to roll back the Clean Water Act and dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, interest and participation is growing in a new EPA- and stakeholder-led citizen science project that aims to inform clean water management. The Cyanobacteria Monitoring Collaborative has been gathering steam […]

The holiday season is upon us! In the spirit of the season, we’ve put together another edition of our annual 12 Days of Christmas Newsletter. ANNNNNNNND…as our gift to you, we’ve made it possible for you to track your citizen science contributions and interests in one place! Check out the beta version of SciStarter 2.0. […]

I believe that citizen science is about citizenship as well as science. By this, I don’t mean citizenship in a specific country, but in a larger community. As a citizen scientist focusing on the natural world, I become a better citizen of that world—the world of tree frogs, say, or hummingbirds or dragonflies. Citizen science makes […]

By: Nohra Murad and Jenny Cutraro Maintaining clean waterways: it’s a challenge confronted at the local level by communities across the globe. Stormwater runoff, trash, even sewage overflow, often contaminate urban waterways, degrading wildlife habitat, reducing opportunities for recreation, and placing drinking water supplies at risk. To confront this challenge, citizen scientists across the country […]

By Russ Campbell Brandywine Creek, which runs through southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware, once poweredBrandywine Creek, which runs through southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware, once powered the mills  that supported European settlements in the late 17th and 18th centuries.  Today, people rely on the creek for recreation and as a source of drinking water.  SciStarter contributor Russ […]

When we think about climate change, we usually picture extreme temperatures, mega-storms, and rising seas disrupting our collective future. But climate change is also erasing our past. At our poles, melting ice is exposing and washing out new archeological discoveries. In the world’s arid regions, severe sandstorms are unearthing and eroding buried treasures. And on […]