Category: Guest Contributor

By: Ayla Fudala If you’ve ever seen bees flying around at night, there’s a good chance they’re so-called “ZomBees”—honey bees whose brains are under the control of tiny fly larvae growing inside their bodies. Yes, you read that correctly.

By Adam Reyer, Project Director for Global Fishing Watch Hundreds of millions of people depend on the ocean for their livelihoods, and almost 3 billion rely on it as a protein source. But countless threats — overfishing, destructive fishing practices, bycatch, dishonest catch reporting, habitat destruction — threaten our oceans and the people who depend […]

Guest blog post from Charles Ault, Superstition Area Land Trust (SALT) community. SALT Citizen Science program emerges in East Valley. Rhythms of Desert Citizen Science program examines the effects of El Niño on our climate. Four organizations dedicated to advancing scientific research, public policy,  and community-based decision making, have come together to develop a program that harnesses the […]

By: Lishka Arata Many things distinguish penguins from rocks. There’s color difference (usually), behavior (penguins waddle, rocks don’t), social structure (rocks don’t have one) — the list goes on. But why might someone need to distinguish between rocks and penguins? It’s a skill central to a long-term project that relies on citizen scientists, working from […]

By: Elizabeth Kittrie, Senior Advisor for Data Science, National Institutes of Health In the spirit of open science – a movement to make data and other information from scientific research available to everyone — the National Institutes of Health invites you to cast your vote and help us decide which of the projects competing for […]

By Lea Shell Middle school students are presented with a bucket of what, at first glance, looks like dirt. They pull handfuls onto their lab bench and carefully begin to sift. “I found a shark tooth!” one student exclaims,  prompting the other students to peer more intently at their own piles. Before long, they see […]

A guest post from the Superstition Area Land Trust (SALT) community in Apache Junction, AZ. Understanding the Rhythms of the Desert: A Citizen Science and Lending Library Program  Presented by: The Superstition Area Land Trust (SALT), SciStarter, Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society, YLACES.org, GLOBE.gov & The Apache Junction Public Library The […]

In the next two posts, as part of our SciStarter in the Classroom collection, guest contributor Ben Graves will share his personal experiences and advice for using citizen science in the classroom. Graves is a fellow with the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation, which supports a small cohort of early-career teachers across the United States with intensive professional development. […]

Guest post by Mike Bear The San Diego-based non-profit Ocean  Sanctuaries was founded in 2014 to create and provide support for marine citizen science projects. The Sevengill Shark Identification Project was one of its first citizen science projects, begun in 2010 in response to anecdotal evidence that divers were seeing increasing numbers Sevengill sharks off […]

Autoimmune Citizen Science is an app to help people with autoimmune diseases track their symptoms, lab tests, and treatments in order to see what’s working and what isn’t. Individual data is aggregated in order to see what’s working for the community as a whole. Check out the project on SciStarter and sign up for the […]