Category: Nature & Outdoors

If you’re looking for more projects for the holiday season, we’ve got 12 Days of Citizen Science for you! “On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…” birds! Partridges, turtle doves, French hens, calling birds, golden rings (pheasants), geese and swans inhabit this festival folk classic celebrating food and merriment. Seabirds, […]

Tracking the Invasive Chinese Mitten Crab through the Chinese Mitten Crab Watch When you go outside on a cold and snowy day you put on a coat and mittens to keep you warm, but did you know that there’s a type of crab that actually wears mittens all year round?  It’s called the Chinese Mitten […]

If you’re looking for more projects for the holiday season, we’ve got 12 Days of Citizen Science for you! Bird watching has been popular for a long time. It goes back at least as far as the 1780 bird-listing song so popular with carolers, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Certainly only birders would count 7 […]

Make sure you’re on Santa’s “nice list” this year. Lend your hands, hearts and brains to science during these 12 days leading up to Christmas! On the 1st day of Christmas, the Alliance for Saving Threatened Forests gave to me: A chance to monitor the invasive insects that attack both hemlocks and Fraser firs (the most popular […]

Baby, it’s cold outside! To mark the first day of winter on December 21st, the SciStarter team put together this list of wintery Citizen Science projects. We bet you’ll feel warm and fuzzy inside when you participate. Counting Weddell Seals in Antarctica Even if your local winter weather does not include ice and snow, you […]

The monarch butterfly is a remarkable species.  Each year these insects migrate in a similar pattern to birds from colder to warmer climates as the seasons change, often returning to the same overwintering sites every year.  Unlike birds, however, no single monarch lives long enough to make the whole migration, so the journey occurs across […]

Dig into this fabulous Thanksgiving menu of citizen science projects you can do between dinner and dessert! “It’s turkey-time!” Those words mean different things to different people—birdwatchers look forward to sighting hens with poults in the spring, hunters raise their glasses when turkey season opens, researchers foresee the final compilation of a summer citizen science count, […]

Dig into even more Thanksgiving projects with your friends and family! Imagine: After months of treacherous sailing across the open ocean, skirting coral reefs and rocky shores, you alight upon lush tropical islands greeted by enticing aromas, unknown species, and a symphony of bird song… Four years into her circumnavigation of the globe, the HMS […]

We’ve updated and reposted this Thanksgiving Day treat,  from Lily Bui! Dig into this serving of Thanksgiving projects with your friends and family! Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count Help researchers take census of winter Monarch butterflies. Count Monarchs in colonies, during the mornings around Thanksgiving. Get started!   Thanksgiving Day Western Bird Count Help monitor winter bird […]

Drag your bones toward even more Halloween-themed citizen science! We know from basic ecology that organisms are adapted to their environment, and where certain organisms live should fall along a gradient of critical environmental factors such as moisture, temperature, nutrient availability, or substrate. How these factors impact diversity and distribution are questions that we could […]