Once you’ve decided to engage your students or family in citizen science, what’s the next step? An excellent jumping off point is to check out Zooniverse, the world’s leading online platform for crowdsourced science with more than 2 million registered users. You can search projects by interest, or download the Into the Zooniverse PDF book for a more in-depth look into a selection of featured 2019 projects.
Another great site is SciStarter, a searchable online citizen science platform. SciStarter founder Darlene Cavalier and team members Catherine Hoffman and Caren Cooper published a new resource guide in 2020, The Field Guide to Citizen Science: How You Can Contribute to Scientific Research and Make a Difference (Timber Press), that we’ve been using to look for project ideas.
After reading through the field guide and signing up for both Zooniverse and SciStarter, we were ready to pick a project. I found a few, then used SciStarter’s search features to find ones that would be of interest to both my kids, ages 6 and 10, especially to find a quick, one-time project we could do in the backyard or hiking near our home to dip our toes in the water. I would definitely recommend SciStarter to narrow down project selection by age, location, and your family or students’ interests. My initial impression of Zooniverse was that it will be perfect for picking out a long-term project that our family can engage in and make a real impact over the next year or two. More on that soon….
For now, I think I’ve found our first project! I ended up picking one that I was already familiar with from my land trust work. iNaturalist is a website and downloadable app that your family or students can use to contribute to a global database of biodiversity information, just by taking photos and recording your observations of the plants and animals you see in the natural world. Upload your photos, add notes on when and where you made your observation, and you’re immediately engaged in citizen science and contributing to global biodiversity research.
