related projects

Project MERCCURI is an investigation of how microbes found in buildings on Earth (in public buildings, stadiums, etc) compare to those on board the biggest building ever built in space – the International Space Station (ISS).

The project provides an opportunity for YOU-- citizen scientists and student scientists --to participate in the research by using kits we will send you to collect microbes from surface areas in buildings or even your own cell phone or shoes. You can form a team or join a team to collect samples through September 2013 with the help of the Science Cheerleaders (current and former NFL and NBA cheerleaders who are also scientists and engineers!).
Your samples will be mailed to the University of California Davis where they will be sequenced and analyzed. Results will be shared on SciStarter so you can compare your samples to those from other locations, including the International Space Station! In addition, up to 40 samples will be selected to fly on the International Space Station where their growth rates will be compared to their counterparts in the UCDavis lab! Wouldn't it be cool if your sample is sent to the International Space Station!?

Teachers: Meet the Project MERCCURI team at the National Science Teachers Association conference in San Antonio on April 11, from 2-3pm! Then, join us at the San Antonio Spurs game on April 12 as we collect microbes from the stadium to send to space!

We collected microbes from a Sacramento Kings and Orlando Magic games and now we invite you to join us at the following events (more will be posted on SciStarter.com/ISS):

April 11: National Science Teachers Association annual conference in San Antonio. From 2-3 pm, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, room 215. If you plan to be there, swing by, say hi, and learn how to get involved in Project MERCCURI to send microbes to space!

April 12: San Antonio Spurs game. Meet us on the court to collect microbes and shoot some baskets! The Spurs are offering discount tickets in addition to providing access to their court! Note: This game is almost sold out so consider purchasing your ticket soon.

April 12: We'll be at Yuri's Night parties celebrating the anniversary of manned space flight...and helping guests collect microbes from their own shoes and cellphones. Meet us at the Museum of Life and Sciences in Durham, NC, the Science Club in Washington, DC, and the California Science Center in L.A.

April 16: We'll be at the National Arts Building in New York City to celebrate Yuri's Night and collect more microbes.

April 20: Philadelphia Science Festival on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway! Stay tuned for more on that!

April 20-21: Calling all programmers! Help hack an app for Project MERCCURI at the NASA Space Apps Challenge in Philly!
If you can’t make it to one of these events, have no fear. We’re in the process of confirming similar events across the country and WE NEED YOU to help us collect microbes and, if you're interested, analyze the results. We will send periodic updates to you as new events are confirmed. We will also hold contests and other special offers to give you the chance to send your microbes to us from the comfort of your home.

Help map, collect, and correct information about power generation locations around the world. Through placing pins of power generation sources on a map or filling out and reviewing correcting information about these sources you will help make studying power generation impact on the global carbon cycle and climate change reach new levels.

I need your help finding "Desmond," an Elderberry Longhorn Beetle, formally known as *Desmocerus palliatus!*

This *beautiful* beetle species used to live throughout a large part of eastern North America but in recent decades it appears as if it has declined in numbers. We need your help to figure out if and why this might be true and how we can help them move back into areas they once lived.

The Elderberry Longhorn Beetle is easy to spot with its bold patterns of blue and gold and long antennae. It's so attractive, in fact, that it was chosen for a USPS stamp design in 1999!

The Dark Sky Meter (available for iPhones) allows citizen scientists to contribute to a global map of nighttime light pollution. Light pollution is a growing problem in urban environments, but now you can help scientists better understand its effects on the environment. By utilizing the camera built in to your iPhone, the Dark Sky Meter actually measures ‘skyglow’ and updates the data in real time.

The Pro version of the app also charts weather conditions and cloud cover so you can take readings at optimal times. The app is as easy to use as taking a picture, and is a fun way to learn about your night sky.

How many stars can you see where you live? The Loss of the Night App (available for Android devices) challenges citizen scientists to identify as many stars as they can in order to measure light pollution. The app is fun and easy to use, and helps users learn constellations as they contribute to a global real-time map of light pollution.

Stargazing is a fantastic way to engage young scientists, but this ancient past time has become increasingly difficult in growing urban areas. Help scientists understand the effects of light pollution and learn about your night sky!

You don't need to leave the city to take part, in fact, the app is designed specifically for use in very polluted areas.

The more stars you observe, and the more often you run the app, the more precise the data for your location will become. As the seasons change so do the stars in the sky, and since there aren't so many very bright stars it is extremely helpful if urban users do measurements in each season.

iPhone users can contribute their own data via the dark sky meter project: http://www.scistarter.com/project/802-Dark%20Sky%20Meter

Anyone without a phone can take part during some parts of the year via GLOBE at Night: http://www.scistarter.com/project/169-GLOBE%20at%20Night

Despite its apparently steady glow, the Sun is a churning mass of superhot plasma that regularly produces powerful flares and storms that can knock out power and communication systems here on Earth. With this Lab explore what makes the Sun so volatile and get access to the same data, images, and tools that scientists use to predict solar storms—so that you can predict them for yourself.

CyberTracker Conservation is a non-profit organisation that promotes the vision of a Worldwide Environmental Monitoring Network. Our ultimate vision is that smart phone users worldwide will use CyberTracker to capture observations on a daily basis.

CyberTracker is the most efficient method of gps field data collection. You can use CyberTracker on a Smartphone or handheld computer to record any type of observation. CyberTracker, which requires no programming skills, allows you to customize an Application for your own data collection needs.

WNYC invites families, armchair scientists and lovers of nature to join in a bit of mass science: track the cicadas that emerge once every 17 years across New Jersey, New York and the whole Northeast by building homemade sensors and reporting your observations.

Magicicada Brood II will make its 17-year appearance when the ground 8" down is a steady 64° F. Help predict the arrival by planting a homemade temperature sensor in the ground and reporting your findings back to to WNYC. Your observations will be put on a map and shared with the entire community.

A study was conducted 40 years ago which suggested a link between climate and when west-European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) come out of hibernation. Last year we repeated this study and over two thousand people logged around 45,000 hedgehogs across Britain. The unusual weather in 2012 has made patterns of activity quite confusing so we are repeating the survey this year to find out more.

We need your help to collect hedgehog records from 1st February until 31st August 2013. Understanding patterns of hedgehog behaviour across the UK will enable us to target the conservation strategy for this charming animal, which is currently in severe decline.

The iSeeChange Almanac is a socially networked weather Almanac for communities to collectively journal their climate experiences -- their observations, feelings, questions, and decisions --- against near-real time climate information.

Founded in April 2012 in Western Colorado, iSeeChange is a public radio and media experiment that fosters multimedia conversations between citizens and scientists about how seasonal weather and climate extremes affect daily American life. From the earliest spring recorded in the history of the United States, a landmark wildfire season, nationwide droughts, and weather records breaking everyday, climate affects every citizen and binds communities together.

iSeeChange is produced by Julia Kumari Drapkin in Western Colorado at KVNF Mountain Grown Community Radio as a part of Localore, a nationwide production of AIR in collaboration with Zeega, with principal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

We just launched the Almanac this week in Western Colorado. Stay tuned for more locations in the coming year!

The Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab in NYC is investigating the different ways people and dogs play together, and we need your help (well, you and your dog’s help). We are cataloguing all the ways people play with their dogs and asking dog owners to submit short videos of their own dog-human play.

By participating in Project: Play with Your Dog, citizen scientists are providing valuable information into the nuances and intricacies of our relationships with dogs.

AirCasting is a platform for recording, mapping, and sharing health and environmental data using your smartphone. Each AirCasting session lets you capture real-world measurements, annotate the data to tell your story, and share it via the CrowdMap.

Using the AirCasting Android app, AirCasters can record, map, and share:
(o) sound levels recorded by their phone microphone;
(o) temperature, humidity, CO and NO2 gas concentrations recorded by the Arduino-powered AirCasting Air Monitor, and;
(o) heart rate measurements recorded by the Zephyr HxM.

Using AirCasting Luminescence, these sensor streams can also be represented using LED lights.

The Human Microbiome Project and other microbiome projects worldwide have laid an important foundation for understanding the trillions of microbes that inhabits each of our bodies. However, opportunities for the public to get involved in such research has been limited. Now, American Gut gives you an opportunity to participate and to compare the microbes in your gut to those in the guts of thousands of other people in the US and elsewhere. American Gut is a project built on open-source, open-access principles. Our data are for the good of understanding and will be shared both with participants and with other scientists.

Help track the health and abundance of the mid-Atlantic scallop fishery!

Researchers at the University of Delaware have developed a new robot-based approach to surveying marine life the ocean floor. They use Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), which can navigate underwater without direct human control, to take photos of marine life in its natural habitat.

By becoming a SubseaObserver you'll play a roll in ocean conservation by helping organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) make better decisions about how to manage the scallop fishery now and for future generations.

As a SubseaObserver you can name your own virtual AUV and choose what part of the mid-Atlantic you'd like to explore.

SubseaObservers also includes information about scallop biology, how the fishery is managed, how AUVs work and where they're used.

Panamath is a free-standing software that can be used to assess number sense - your intuitive recognition of numbers and their relationship. Researchers in laboratories throughout the world have utilized this research tool in studies of number knowledge, mathematical acuity, and learning in general.

Curious? Use Panamath to test your own number sense, read more about the research being done or download the software and adapt it for your own research or educational purposes.

Psychologists at Birkbeck Babylab wants to know what makes babies laugh. We think babies are going to be laughing at things that they are just starting to understand. (Once you know that dogs are supposed to go ‘woof’, a dog that goes ‘miaow’ is only going to be hilarious.) With enough detailed observations from enough babies at different ages we can paint a cheerful picture of what they understand at different ages.

So if you’ve made a baby laugh recently we’d like to hear about it. If you haven’t made a baby laugh recently, go and find one and get to work. It's fun but it's also science!

Project BudBurst, a NEON citizen science program, is a network of people across the United States monitoring plants as the seasons change. We are a national field campaign designed to engage the public in the collection of important ecological data based on the timing of leafing, flowering, and fruiting of plants (plantphenophases). Project BudBurst participants make careful observations of these phenophases. We are interested in observations from five plant groups – deciduous trees and shrubs; wildflowers and herbs; evergreens; conifers; and grasses. To participate, you simply need access to a plant.

Supporting and enhancing our understanding of continental-scale environmental change, Project BudBurst data are being collected in a consistent manner across the country for scientists and educators to use to learn more about the responsiveness of individual plant species to changes in local, regional and national climates. Thousands of people from all 50 states are participating and have generated a robust data set that is available for use by scientists and educators to increase understanding of how plants respond to environmental change. Formal and informal educators are finding Project BudBurst an effective approach to engaging their students and visitors in an authentic research experience.
Join our growing community!

Whether you have an afternoon, a few weeks, a season, or a whole year, you can make an important contribution to a better understanding of changing climates. Participating in Project BudBurst is easy – everything needed to participate is on the web site. Choose a plant to monitor and share your observations with others online. Not sure where to start? Take a look at our Ten Most Wanted species.

Project BudBurst is a NEON Citzen Science Program funded by the National Science Foundation.

CoCoRaHS, The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network is a unique, non-profit, community-based network of volunteers of all ages who measure and report precipitation. By using low-cost measurement tools, stressing training and education, and utilizing an interactive website, our aim is to provide the highest quality data for natural resource, education and research applications.

Each time a rain, hail, or snow storm occurs, volunteers take measurements of precipitation from their registered locations (reports of 'zero' precipitation are encouraged too!). The reports are submitted to the website and are immediately available for viewing. It's educational, but moreover, fun! Just wait until you start comparing how much rain fell in your backyard vs. your neighbor!

The data are used by the National Weather Service, meteorologists, hydrologists, emergency managers, city utilities, insurance adjusters, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, engineers, mosquito control, ranchers and farmers, outdoor and recreation interests, teachers, students, and neighbors in the community.

Bat Detective is an online citizen science project which allows visitors to the website to take part in wildlife conservation by listening out for bat calls in recordings collected all over the world.

By sorting the sounds in the recordings into insect and bat calls, bat detectives will help biologists learn how to reliably distinguish bat 'tweets' to develop new automatic identification tools.

Bats use lots of different types of sounds, from singing to each other to find a mate, to using the echoes from their tweets to find their way around. Usually bat sounds are inaudible to humans as they are too high for us to hear, but special 'time expansion' ultrasonic detectors convert these sounds to a lower frequency, and visitors to the Bat Detective website can listen to these unique recordings and help distinguish different sounds.

One out of every five species of bats is threatened with extinction and better automatic identification tools are desperately needed to quickly process vast amounts of sound data collected by volunteers from the bat monitoring programme iBats who survey bat populations each year.

Bats are found all over the world from local parks to pristine rainforests and monitoring their population trends provides an important indicator of healthy ecosystems. Developing new tools that allow biologists to interpret population trends from sound will allow bats' tweets to act as a way to track environmental change.

Bat Detective was developed at University College London, Bat Conservation Trust, Bat Life Europe with the Citizen Science Alliance.

Dictionaries have existed for centuries, but scientists still haven't worked out the exact meanings for most words. This is a serious problem if you want to train computers to understand language. If we don't know what words mean, it's hard to teach computers what they mean. It is similarly hard to understand how children come learn the meanings of words, when we don't fully understand those meanings ourselves.

Rather than try to work out the definition of a word all at once, we have broken the problem into a series of separate tasks. Each task has a fanciful backstory -- which we hope you enjoy! -- but at its heart, each task is asking about a specific component of meaning that scientists suspect makes up one of the building blocks of meaning.

You can participate for as little as a few minutes or come back to the site over and over to help code the many thousands of words in English.

Help explore how biochar works in local soils by using your very own garden. (Biochar is a specialized form of charcoal that is suitable for use in agriculture.) This little-known soil enhancer has been shown in lab tests and field trials around the world to be beneficial for soil health and plant production, and we want to test it under local conditions.

This project is easy, fun, and an interesting activity for the whole family. We are also partnering with school garden programs, so if you are involved with one please contact us as well.

We want to be able to find correlations between people's ideas, behaviours and aspirations (all of which we are calling memes) and their health, wellbeing and lifespan.

If we can find ideas, memes, behaviours and aspirations that could potentially increase health, wellbeing and lifespan we use this data to create an academic dataset, educational tools and further citizen science and quantified self practices.

We are not just interested in finding associations with increasing average lifespan, or reaching the current maximum lifespan, but finding ideas and behaviours that may be correlated with increasing maximum lifespan as well as maintaining mutual health and wellbeing.

The dataset will be analysed using inter-disciplinary methods including linguistics, bioinformatics, omics, statistics, machine learning, computational modelling, memetics.

We would like to get at least 1000 participants, and many ideas, behaviours and aspirations per person.

I am a PhD student who has so far funded this project personally to following my passions (longevity science, science outreach and empowering people to be healthy, happy and long lived). I would really appreciate if you could take part and share this project with your friends and family.

What we think and do effects how long we will live and could potentially live - let us work together to find the best thoughts and actions to create a better world!

The Astro Drone game is part of a scientific crowd sourcing project. People who possess a Parrot AR drone can play the game, in which they are challenged to perform different space missions in an augmented reality. Contribute to future space exploration by playing the free Astro Drone game!

The iPhone app is more than a game. Players can choose to contribute to a scientific crowd sourcing experiment that aims to improve autonomous capabilities of space probes, such as landing, obstacle avoidance, and docking. The app processes the images made by the AR drone's camera, extracting abstract mathematical image features. These features can neither be interpreted by humans, nor can the original image be reconstructed. However, the features can be used by robots to learn how to navigate in their environment. Players can join the experiment by going to the high score table. If they agree, the feature data is sent over the Internet.

The first release contains the training level, in which players learn to dock as well as possible to the International Space Station. New levels will be added incrementally with new releases.

AstroDrone is a project performed by the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency.

The Canine Health Project tracks individual statistics on purebred dogs, using the Rat Terrier as a model. Information such as height, weight, date of birth, genotype, number of progeny and list of related individuals are recorded as a reference.

Join seafarers in the global scientific experiment to study marine phytoplankton.

The phytoplankton underpin the marine food chain, so we need to know as much about them as possible. To participate in this project, you'll need to create a Secchi Disk, a tool that measures water turbidity, and use the free iPhone or Android ‘Secchi’ application.

You can take a Secchi Disk reading as often as you wish, every day, once a week, twice a month, or just occasionally. The data you collect will help scientists around the world to understand the phytoplankton.

Join in and help make this the world’s largest public marine biological study.

Planet Four is a citizen science project in which volunteers help planetary scientists identify and measure features on the surface of Mars.

Scientists need your help to find and mark ‘fans’ and ‘blotches’ on the Martian surface, features that indicate wind direction and speed. By tracking these features, you can help planetary scientists better understand Mars’ climate.

All of the images you'll see depict the southern polar region, a little known area of Mars. The majority of these images have never been seen by humans until now.

This is your chance to explore the surface of Mars like never before!

You’ll learn your dog’s cognitive style by playing fun, science-based games –- an experience that gives you the insight you need to make the most of your relationship with your best friend.

A key aspect of the Dognition methodology is our use of Citizen Science – research that can be conducted by everyone, not just people with Ph.D.s. By gathering this data we can begin to understand more about all dogs, much more quickly and on a broader scale than if scientists had to conduct this research themselves.

Come join our ongoing BioPrinter community project!

Did you know you can print live cells from an inkjet printer? Companies like Organovo are developing ways to 3D print human tissues and organs. But the basic technologies are so accessible that we wanted to play around with them ourselves.

We've built our own functioning bioprinter from a couple of old CD drives, an inkjet cartridge, and an Arduino. We probably won't be printing human organs any time soon, but how about printing a leaf from plant cells? Or add a BlueRay laser to turn it into a miniature laser cutter to print "lab-on-a-chip" microfluidic devices. The possibilities are endless - it all depends where *you* want to take it!

Our community projects are open to anyone, and are driven entirely by whoever wants to show up and participate. This is a great opportunity to come check out BioCurious, and jump into some of the projects going on.

This project has something for everyone, whether it's hardware hacking. programming, Arduinos, microfluidics, synthetic biology, plant biology, cell culturing, tissue engineering - you name it! Everyone has something to learn, or something to teach.

By just taking photos and observing spiders, you can help the Explorit Science Center learn about which climates certain spiders live in and track the distribution of spiders over time.

Join the Explorit’s Community Science Project by finding and recording spiders in your home or neighborhood (as many as you can!). Use your camera or smart phone to take a photo of the spider and submit it online to add to our geographical database.

Spiders have long been thought of a useful natural method of pest control, but how will expected temperature changes or other environmental changes affect the spider’s usefulness as pest-killers and their distribution?

We don't yet know how climate change will impact spiders, and in turn impact agriculture such as crops and farms- but when we understand where spiders are living today, we will be better able to predict what may happen to spiders and agriculture in the future.

Access to health care and the cost and safety of healthcare services are of critical interest to our country. Physicians and other professional care providers, and academic and community-based hospitals and clinics, are important partners in discovering the best methods to deliver care. Input from patients – the consumers of healthcare services – is also vital. Regenstrief Institute, Inc., an internationally recognized healthcare research organization affiliated with the Indiana University School of Medicine, is conducting an online contest, inviting submission of original ideas for improving the delivery of health care in the U.S. As an academic institution, we are particularly interested in the ideas of our next generation of young professionals and scientists. The winning idea will be selected by a panel of medical and community-based professionals and researchers, according to the following criteria: innovative idea with measurable impact for healthcare consumers; feasible to implement in the U.S. healthcare system within five years; and compatible with Regenstrief Institute’s mission to improve health through research that enhances the quality and cost-effectiveness of health care. The prize includes a trip for the winner to Indianapolis, Indiana for the idea kick-off at the Indiana University School of Medicine and Regenstrief Institute, Inc.

We are a group of scientists interested in exploring the potential applications of Ecuador’s unique biodiversity. As a first step, we are working to assemble and apply gene libraries collected from around the country.
You can join field trips in Ecuador to collect samples, work in a lab extracting and sequencing nucleic acids, or from home assembling and curating the electronic database.

This is a transcription project that aims to transcribe the Digital Bleek and Lloyd Collection, written in the late 1870's. This collection contains scanned notebooks of |Xam and !Kun languages of the Hunter-Gatherer (Bushman) people of Southern Africa.

Science Pipes is a free service that lets you connect to real biodiversity data, use simple tools to create visualizations and feeds, and embed results on your own website.

SciencePipes allows anyone to access, analyze, and visualize the huge volume of primary biodiversity data currently available online. This site provides access to powerful scientific analyses and workflows through an intuitive, rich web interface based on the visual programming paradigm, similar to Yahoo Pipes. Analyses and visualizations are authored in an open, collaborative environment which allows existing analyses and visualizations to be shared, modified, repurposed, and enhanced.

Behind the scenes, SciencePipes is based on the Kepler scientific workflow software which is used by professional researchers for analysis and modeling. SciencePipes brings that scientific power to new audiences by consolidating the same workflow components used by scientists into pieces that have more intuitive meaning, and by providing components specifically targeted to these audiences.

Because SciencePipes provides tools for original data analyses rather than visualizations of predetermined analyses, it empowers users to develop new and valuable results. Those results can be exposed as dynamic web resources, in web contexts unrelated this site. Finally, because of the generality of the Kepler scientific system upon which this site is built, this online system can be extended to science and engineering disciplines beyond the environmental sciences.

The Canadian Forest Service is asking Canadians to use their local knowledge to identify possible deforestation areas.

Satellites produce much of the available imagery about Canadian forests. However, many of these images do not have enough detail to identify an area has been deforested. The only way to identify deforestation is to visit the area in person. These visits involve travel by air and land vehicles, which results in heavy use of fossil fuels.

By asking local people to visit the sites and then report back to us on the event, we can saving money, reduce travel costs/green house gas emissions, and engaging citizens with their local environment. In addition, your local knowledge and input can help reduce our carbon footprint and deliver one of the most accurate Carbon accounting estimates in world.

uBiome is the world's first effort to map the human microbiome through citizen science.

What's the microbiome? The microbiome are the bacteria that live on and within us. It sounds kind of funny, but all of us are actually covered in helpful germs. Many conditions – from diabetes to depression, asthma to autism -- have been found to relate to the microbiome.

uBiome brings this cutting edge technology directly to consumers for the first time. The more data we collect, the more we can learn about this important area of research. We've been featured so far in Wired, Venture Beat, the Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, BoingBoing, and more.

Magpie Mapper is a smartphone app for recording observations of Magpies, one of the most fascinating and striking birds in the United Kindgom. When you see a magpie, simply log it on the app and your data will be used in our research into how birds are distributed throughout our towns cities and countryside.

With their long tails and impressive black and white plumage, magpies are unmistakable. Magpies are so ingrained in our folklorethat people often greet them with "Hello Mr Magpie!".

Now you can digitally salute a magpie with the Magpie Mapper app!

Marblar is unique and fun way to engage in citizen science and exchange ideas across disciplines. Marblar posts research projects in need of creative, real-world applications and they ask YOU to come up with those applications.

Singing up is easy and free and there are new projects added regularly. Projects are posted for three weeks. Through online collaboration, the final solutions are posted for users to vote on and further discuss. Top solutions are even awarded cash prizes!

Beginning November 14 through the end of the year, students ages 13-18 around the globe are invited to participate in “Data Detectives”, an engaging web experience to learn about how Big Data will impact their lives and the world they will be inheriting.

Data Detectives is the student component of the Human Face of Big Data, a global crowdsourced project conceived by “Day in Life” series creator Rick Smolan. It aims to help people better visualize the ways big data is shaping our future on this planet, and includes a smartphone app, worldwide events, a large format illustrated book with an interactive iPad app, and a documentary.

The Data Detectives initiative invites students to answer questions, explore fascinating examples of how Big Data is changing their world, interact with real-time data and see how other students around the globe are impacted in similar and different ways.

Nonmarine ostracods, tiny crustaceans with an excellent fossil record, are common in aquatic ecosystems. The Ostracod Metadatabase of Environmental and Geographical Attributes (OMEGA) facilitates access to global geographical and environmental distributional data for nonmarine ostracods, supporting applications in biodiversity auditing, biogeography and the calibration of species as fossil proxies for past environmental and climatic change. Citizen Scientists can help improve accuracy and coverage of datasets by adding, correcting and validating the geographical coordinates of localities.

The Museum of Natural History, Los Angeles County, is partnering with Butterflies and Moths of North America (BAMONA) to share data and learn more about L.A. butterflies and moths. Help us find and photograph them in Los Angeles.

We know there are 237 species recorded for L.A, County, but how many can you find?

Help scientists recover Arctic and worldwide weather observations made by United States’ ships since the mid-19th century.

These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and will improve our knowledge of past environmental conditions. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and tell the stories of the people on board.

Hurricane Sandy is currently moving northward along the East coast of the USA (as of 10/29/12), and is expected to collide with a cold front and move inland across the northeastern USA during the next several days. On Friday, WaterIsotopes initiated a call for assistance in collecting samples of precipitation (both rain and snow) associated with the passage of this system.

The goal is to develop an unprecedented spatial and temporal dataset documenting the isotopic composition of rainwater (and snow) associated with this major storm system. These data will tell us about water sources and cycling within the storm system.

We're hoping to see evidence for changes in water sources to the storm as it first collides with the approaching cold front and then leaves the ocean to traverse the NE USA.

There are cures for cancers buried in our data. Help us find them.

Cancer Research UK and the Zooniverse need your help to classify archive cancer samples. We’re on the brink of many new breakthroughs. By giving just a few minutes of your time and a few clicks of your mouse, you can help accelerate our research. By doing so, you are helping us to make these breakthroughs happen faster.

Each image you will see is a tiny tumour sample from a huge dataset. Help our scientists to accelerate the analysis of this data by identifying the coloured sections of the image using our prompts, and bring forward the cures for cancers.

Get to know the nature of YOUR world! The Fairbanks Community of Observers is to encourage greater public clarity around environmental indicators of climate change in Vermont and northern New Hampshire. Using the website developed by the Fairbanks Museum, we'll collect your quantitative data focused on the life cycles of specific birds, butterflies and wildflowers that are sensitive to environmental change as well as seasonal weather data that is characteristic to our region.

The Community of Observers is for individuals, families, clubs, groups and schools. It is designed to encourage citizen scientists to gain a deeper understanding of the cycles and patterns that characterize our region through the seasons, and how the habitats that depend on these cycles might be affected by global climate shifts.

The Bodleian Libraries are enlisting the help of the public in order to improve access to their music collections. Over four thousand digitized scores, mostly piano music from the nineteenth century, many of which have illustrated covers, have now been made available online.

By describing these images, you will not only be helping to provide access to this valuable but hitherto 'hidden' collection, you will also be facilitating future research into popular music of the period and the wider social function which it performed during the Victorian age.

The Geo-Wiki Project is a citizen science network that hopes to improve the overall quality of land use and land cover maps across the globe. They host a variety of projects, all of which use their online Google Earth Application to enlist citizen scientists to improve spatial data. By comparing global land use and land cover data to the aerial photography that appears in Google Earth, you can help improve the validity of important data that is being used to solve important global problems.

Geo-Wiki supports a variety of projects that tackle issues that include climate change, the bio-diversity of plants, and the viability of changing agriculture.

They even have developed mobile apps that allow you to ‘ground truth’ data by adding your own photographs of what’s near you.

Video games have the potential to do more than entertain. Citizen Sort is taking advantage of this potential by designing video games that make doing science fun.

Citizen Sort is a research project at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University in New York. Students from Syracuse University drew, colored, programmed and coded two unique citizen science video games. They are Forgotten Island and Happy Match.

Happy Match is a twist on the classic matching game. Players will classify photos of animal, plant and insect species that scientists took live in the field. Each round of the game has a different question and players will drag the animal, plant or insect photo into one of the photo answers along the bottom. Scientists wrote the questions in Happy Match based on information they want to know. By classifying the photos, you'll these help scientists as they study the natural world.

Forgotten Island is a point and click adventure game. Players take on the role of a lost adventurer with a secret past. As the player explores the island they meet a suspicious robot spouting orders to re-classify the falling photographs of plant, animal or insect species. The player will also solve puzzles and explore diverse locations from icy peaks to fiery volcanoes.The more classifications a player does, the more money they earn buy items and solve the mystery of Forgotten Island.

Citizen Sort is partially supported by the US National Science Foundation under grant SOCS 09-68470.

eCYBERMISSION is a web-based Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) competition free for students in grades six through nine where teams can compete for State, Regional and National Awards while working to solve problems in their community. Deadline to sign up: January 15th

eCYBERMISSION challenges you to explore how Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics work in your world.

Biodiversity Volunteer Portal

Helping to understand, manage and conserve Australia's biodiversity through community based capture of biodiversity data.

Help us capture the wealth of biodiversity information hidden in our natural history collections, field notebooks and survey sheets. This information will be used for better understanding, managing and conserving our precious biodiversity.

ZooTeach is a website where teachers and educators can share high quality lesson plans and resources that complement the Zooniverse citizen science projects. Citizen science offers a unique opportunity for any person, of any age, of any background to get involved and make a contribution to cutting edge science. Here at Zooniverse headquarters we believe that getting students involved in citizen science offers educators a free, easily accesible and inspiring opportunity to bring real science into the classroom.

Join thousands of people around the world in a conversation about World Wide Views on Biodiversity. What do you think about the way biodiversity is managed? How do you think we should solve the problem of biodiversity loss? Tell us – and see what others are saying!

On Saturday, September 15, people in over 30 countries joined together for a day of deliberations about these issues. There is still time to add your voice – use the materials on the project's site to learn more about the issue of biodiversity, and then chime in with your ideas. Strike up a conversation with your friends to help inform your decision, or leave a comment to start a discussion with others.

Biodiversity is the species, genetic, and ecosystem diversity in an area, sometimes including associated components such as landscape features or climate. Still feel like you need to know more? You can dive deep into the issues with information from some of the National Research Council’s recent and historic work on the topic. Or skip ahead to the booklet, which all participants in the World Wide Views on Biodiversity deliberations received.
Charge:

Vote to add your voice to the conversation.

SatCam lets you capture observations of sky and ground conditions with a smart phone app at the same time that an Earth observation satellite is overhead.

When you capture a SatCam observation and submit it to our server, it helps us to check the quality of the cloud products that we create from the satellite data. In return, we send you the satellite image that was captured at your location, anywhere in the world! SatCam supports the Terra, Aqua, and Suomi NPP satellites.

SatCam was developed at the Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison .

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) needs you to take complex scientific data and images and turn them into informative graphics to convey a simple and easy to understand messages! The JPL’s newest venture is called JPL Infographics, and they need your help to create and post your very own creations of scientific graphic art.

All of the resources are at your fingertips, including high-resolution images, 3-D models, fact sheets, and loads of other data build your very own Infographics. You can browse the numerous of other user creations to get inspired and then upload your creation online!

This is a really fun and challenging project and your work will be used to educate and inform others on the goings on of cutting-edge space exploration. So fire of both sides of your brain and create some educational space art!

Just listen to a few laughs and tell us whether they are real or posed.

The results will help scientists from University College London to understand the way we perceive and react to different sounds. The experiment should take about 10 minutes.

The Meteon Network is an ambitious collaboration in Italy to make scientific data from over 400 weather nationwide stations available in an easy to understand visual interface. You can now join in this groundbreaking work and gain access to loads of real time data. You can even add your own data and share analysis among the many members of the network.

The Meteon Network also employs several newer, more human centric, data products including something they call ‘weatherness’, among others, that are normalized to an easy to understand scale. All of these, and several other more traditional weather related measurements, are all displayed in real time on the Network’s interactive mapping application.

This kind of nationwide effort to monitor, analyze, and give citizens a more complete picture of weather may serve as a model for others to follow. Now is your chance to get involved in a trailblazing project and get into weather today!

This DIY mapping tool was the first developed by Public Lab, as part of the Grassroots Mapping project. Citizens use helium-filled balloons and digital cameras to generate high resolution “satellite” maps of areas such as in the Gulf Coast and Gowanus Canal. Although this tool has been in use for two years, components of the kit -- kite and balloon design, the rig, the camera -- continue to evolve as they are adopted in new places and adapted for new purposes. Besides the aerial mapping tools, Public Lab has also developed MapKnitter.org, an online tool for stitching aerial images into maps.

The U.S. Geological Survey is asking volunteers to help map man-made structures and facilities, such as schools and fire stations, in the state of Colorado then, in a few months, the United State. Using an internet mapping application, volunteers can help the USGS update The National Map by correcting or adding information about structures nearby.

"Correctly locating and identifying fire stations, police stations, schools, and hospitals not only makes USGS maps more useful, but can literally save a life," said USGS Director Marcia McNutt.

At this very moment in Serengeti National Park, 200 cameras are flashing throughout the night, in corners of the park where tourists never go.

These are camera traps -- remote, automatic cameras that take pictures of passing wildlife - and the Serengeti Lion Project is conducting the largest-ever camera trap survey to better understand the Serengeti ecosystem. The camera traps capture over 1,000,000 images of wildlife each year, capturing the grandeur of the wildebeest migration and rarely seen species from aardvarks to zebras.

Help to transmit these photos by satellite from the Serengeti to the U.S., where they can be analyzed to advance science and conservation. Join this unprecedented initiative to bring cutting edge technology to the wilds of Serengeti, and you'll get first access to witness the Serengeti Live on your computer.

Australia's national crowdsourced koala map, plotting the locations of koala populations in the wild, points of impact, causes of death and injury. Become a member of KoalaTracker.com.au to view the map, search the database, see the library of member images available for use in non-commercial projects. Learn more about the koala and how you can really do something to save it before it is too late.

The chloroplasts inside plant cells appear to "clump" together during bacterial infection; this can be devastating for plants and seriously compromise crop yields. We need your help to classify plant cell images by their "clumpiness" in order to further this research.

Helping us to classify the images will give insights into the progression of bacterial infection in plant cells.

ZomBee Watch is a citizen science project sponsored by the San Francisco State University Department of Biology, the San Francisco State University Center for Computing for Life Sciences and the Natural History Museum of LA County. ZomBee Watch was initiated as a follow-up to the discovery that the Zombie Fly Apocephalus borealis is parasitizing honey bees in California and possibly other areas of North America.

ZomBee Watch has three main goals.
1. To determine where in North America the Zombie Fly Apocephalus borealis is parasitizing honey bees.
2. To determine how often honey bees leave their hives at night, even if they are not parasitized by the Zombie Fly.
3. To engage citizen scientists in making a significant contribution to knowledge about honey bees and to become better observers of nature.

We need your help finding out where honey bees are being parasitized by the Zombie Fly and how big a threat the fly is to honey bees. So far, the Zombie Fly has been found parasitizing honey bees in California and South Dakota. We are teaming up with citizen scientists (like you!) to determine if the fly has spread to honey bees across North America.

We need your help to better understand dragonfly migration in North America. Although it spans three countries and has been documented since the 1880s, North American dragonfly migration is still poorly understood, and much remains to be learned about migratory cues, flight pathways, and the southern limits of overwintering grounds. Become part of an international network of citizen scientists and help monitor the spring and fall movements of the 5 main migratory species in North America, or report on these species throughout the year at a pond or wetland of your choice.

Counting butterflies for just fifteen minutes could help scientists better understand the environment. The Big Butterfly Count is a recently started national survey that hopes to engage citizen scientists by creating easy and engaging survey methods. Started by the charity group Butterfly Conservation in 2010, the program has grown to over 34,000 participants!

The big butterfly count takes place this year from Saturday 14th July - Sunday 5th August 2012. All you have to do is submit your butterfly counts for just fifteen minutes of observation. A colorful identification poster is available online and submission on the project website couldn’t be easier.

Butterflies are quite sensitive to changes in the environment and are excellent indicators of potential issues with other wildlife. By studying the trends in butterfly counts, scientists can better understand the relationships between wildlife and the environment.

This is an easy, fun, and meaningful way to engage in science. Print out an identification poster, get outside, and start counting!

What should we do about climate change?

Somehow we have to answer this question. You can help. The Climate CoLab seeks to harness the collective intelligence of contributors from all over the world to develop solutions to the problem of global climate change.

In this online global forum, people can create, analyze and select detailed proposals outlining the actions they believe should be taken to address climate change.

Petridish allows citizens to support science by directly funding independent and small -scale research projects. While this is a somewhat non-traditional citizen science project, funding is an important part of science, and Petridish allows science lovers everywhere to truly make a difference and support innovative science.

Similar to other crowd funding style websites, Petridish lets you browse projects and donate online to the research projects of your choice. Each project has a variety of donation levels with enticing rewards for each level. Typical rewards included souvenirs from the field, acknowledgement in journal articles, chances to join researchers in the field, dinner with a famous researcher, and even naming rights to new species!

You can explore projects by both research subject and reward type. After you donate, share your involvement and information about the project through Facebook and Twitter and help projects gain momentum and reach their goals.

Calling all Citizen Scientists to contribute your thoughts to the DEVISE project and help develop tools to measure learning in citizen science! DEVISE (Developing, Validating, and Implementing Situated Evaluation Instruments) is an NSF-funded project spearheaded by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. A major goal of DEVISE is to help project leaders evaluate the many different ways in which participants learn as they collect, analyze, and manipulate data. We need your feedback to develop tools that can accurately measure outcomes related to science and environmental interest, knowledge, skills, and behaviors. Participating in this project is easy – just follow the link "get started now" above right, and give your thoughts on topics such as the Nature of Science, Motivation, Science Inquiry Skills, and Environmental Stewardship. There are no right or wrong answers - we just want your opinions.
Simply click the Join In tab above or the Get Started button to the right!

The Solar Hydrogen Activity Research Kit (SHArK) Project gives you the tools to discover a storable form of solar energy.

Solar energy is the only option for producing the renewable carbon-free power needed to power the planet. However, because the sun doesn't shine at night, it is critical that we develop a method to store the energy for night. Producing hydrogen from sunlight and water is an ideal solution to the storage problem.

The SHArK Project uses the process of photoelectrolysis, whereby certain metal oxides are used with solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Currently, no known stable material is capable of efficiently and inexpensively photoelectrolyzing water with visible light. There are, however, millions of untested compounds that might.

This is where students can take the reigns and contribute to real and meaningful science. The SHArK project provides inexpensive kits that include inkjet printers, laser pointers, and LEGOs® to allow students a fun and engaging way to explore chemistry and contribute potential solutions to the world’s energy problem.

Harness the power of the sun with the SHArK Project!

Do you have an Astronomy Story to tell? Create interactive, narrated tours about your favorite astronomical objects in WorldWide Telescope, and share them with the world.

Solitary bees and wasps in your own backyard!!!

Native Buzz is a citizen science project created by the University of Florida (UF) Honey Bee Research and Extension Lab. Our goal is to learn more about the nesting preferences, diversity and distribution of our native solitary bees and wasps, share the information gained and provide a forum for those interested in participating in the science and art of native beekeeping (and wasp-keeping!).

Here at University of Florida Native Buzz you can keep track of your own native buzz nest site and see the results of other participant’s nest sites.

You are invited to the Hubble Space Telescope's vast science archive to dig out the best unseen Hubble images -- and win prizes!

Over two decades in orbit, Hubble has made a huge number of observations. But hidden in Hubble’s huge data archives are still some truly breathtaking images that have never been seen in public. The archive is so vast that nobody really knows the full extent of what Hubble has observed.

This is where you come in. Researchers need you to find and tweak Hubble observations using a set of simple online tools. If you're feeling saucy, you can find Hubble observations and then process them using professional astronomical imaging software. You can win various Apple products and goodies.

Competition ends May 31, 2012.

The North American Bird Phenology Program, part of the USA-National Phenology Network, was a network of volunteer observers who recorded information on first arrival dates, maximum abundance, and departure dates of migratory birds across North America. Active between 1880 and 1970, the program was coordinated by the Federal government and sponsored by the American Ornithologists' Union. It exists now as a historic collection of six million migration card observations, illuminating almost a century of migration patterns and population status of birds. Today, in an innovative project to curate the data and make them publicly available, the records are being scanned and placed on the internet, where volunteers worldwide transcribe these records and add them into a database for analysis.

Ancient Lives allows citizen scientists to help transcribe ancient papyri texts from Greco-Roman Egypt. The data gathered will help scholars reveal new knowledge of the literature, culture, and lives of Greco-Romans in ancient Egypt.

The 1,0000 year old transcripts were originally found by researchers in 1896 in the city of Oxrhynchus, often called the ‘City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’. Over the next decade, over 500,000 fragments of papyri were uncovered and the collections stands today as largely unstudied. That is why Ancient Lives needs your help to measure fragments and transcribe Ancient Greek characters.

The project is a collaboration between researchers at Oxford University and several other international groups.

Planet Hunters is a project from Zooniverse where citizen scientists help astronomers identify new planets.

Through data taken from the Kepler Spacecraft, citizens are helping scientists identify stars with possible planets in the Cygnus constellation. The Spacecraft takes brightness data every thirty minutes from over 150,000 stars so there is a lot to look at.

When planets pass in front of stars, the brightness of that star dips, which shows up on the light curves taken from Kepler. These patterns are not always easily recognized by computer algorithms, and in many cases, the human brain is actually more capable of identifying brightness dips.

How much will the ground shake when your students take part in the Big Cheer on April 27, 2012 at 1:30pm ET (10:30am PT)?

Join the Big Cheer for Science on April 27, 2012 at 1:30 pm ET, presented by SciStarter, Science Cheerleader, USGS, the Iris Consortium, Discover Magazine and the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Anchored at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, DC, this one minute cheer will include plenty of stomping and shaking in an effort to get kids jazzed about science AND measure seismic activity caused by their cheer!

Liven up your classroom with a cheer that students do standing next to their desks.

In Washington, DC, dozens of Science Cheerleaders (scientists and engineers--who also happen to be cheerleaders for the Redskins, Wizards and Ravens among other NFL and NBA teams) will lead a one minute cheer for science with 10,000 students at the DC Convention center. While we're doing the cheer in DC, hundreds of schools across the country will do the same cheer at the same time.

During the cheer, you can have your students record your local ground movement during the Big Cheer and share it with other participating schools for comparison. Comparisons can be further made to how much the ground shakes during the Big Cheer at the Washington D.C. Convention Center and in your classroom and to how much it shakes during an actual earthquake.

To join the Big Cheer, click on the Join In tab above or the "Get Started" button to the right!

To learn about hundreds of other research projects in need of help from the public, check out the SciStarter Project Finder: http://scistarter.com/finder.

GOOOO SCIENCE and ENGINEERING!

Submit your cellular images to The Cell: An Image Library - CCDB is a public and easily accessible resource database of images, videos, and animations of cells, capturing a wide diversity of organisms, cell types, and cellular processes. The purpose of this database is to advance research on cellular activity, with the ultimate goal of improving human health.

This Library is a repository for images and movies of cells from a variety of organisms. It demonstrates cellular architecture and functions with high quality images, videos, and animations. This comprehensive and easily accessible Library is designed as a public resource first and foremost for research, and secondarily as a tool for education. The long-term goal is the construction of a library of images that will serve as primary data for research.

The Library effort represents not only the creation of the electronic infrastructure, but also a systematic protocol for acquisition, evaluation, annotation, and uploading of images, videos, and animations.

Help scientist improve maps of Mars and participate in other research tasks to help NASA manage the large amount of data from the Red Planet.

Users create Martian profiles and become "citizens" of the planet. In the map room, citizens can then earn Martian credits by helping place satellite photos on Mars’s surface, counting craters, and even helping the rovers Spirit and Opportunity by tagging photos with descriptions.

The highly interactive website is rich in content and contains other informational videos and mapping applications for citizens to tour Mars and get to know every nook and cranny of its rocky surface.

Become a Martian, explore Mars, have fun!

Help scientists with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter better understand the structure and history of the lunar surface: identify, measure, and classify images of craters on the moon. Your efforts will help us define the places future missions will study closer - including perhaps even future human missions.

The Zero Robotics Autonomous Space Capture Challenge asks individuals and teams of programmers from around the world to develop a fuel-optimal control algorithm. The algorithm must enable a satellite to accomplish a feat that’s very difficult to do autonomously: capture a space object that’s tumbling, spinning or moving in the opposite direction.

From March 28 to April 25, 2012, challenge participants will collaborate via the Zero Robotics Website to create a computer algorithm that will be programmed into bowling-ball sized satellites called SPHERES (short for Synchronized Position, Hold, Engage, and Reorient Experimental Satellites) aboard the International Space Station (ISS). An object, simulating a Phoenix payload on-orbit delivery system, will be set in motion inside the ISS under varying conditions, such as tumbling or spinning. The algorithm developed will need to direct the SPHERES satellite to approach the moving object and orient itself to contact with the object via Velcro on the SPHERES satellites.

The winners of each round will be invited to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to view the finals via videolink from the ISS, where the four algorithms will be programmed into SPHERES and tested.

Zero Robotics is co-sponsored by NASA and is run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Space Systems Laboratory to engage U.S. middle and high school students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

You don’t have to be a science expert to be a brilliant solar stormwatcher. Help scientists spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. Your work will give astronauts an early warning if dangerous solar radiation is headed their way. And you could make a new scientific discovery.

Explore interactive diagrams to learn out about the Sun and the spacecraft monitoring it. The STEREO spacecraft is scientists’ latest mission to study the Sun and space weather – not clouds and rain, but how solar storms change conditions in space and on Earth.

Solar Stormwatch isn't just about classifying data. You can talk to other members on our forum, sign up for our space weather forecast from Twitter, and learn about the latest discoveries on our blog. You can also see how solar storms affect Earth at our Flickr group Aurora chasers, featuring beautiful photos of aurora.

if you’d like to know more about what you’re looking at, then explore our beautiful and interactive zoomable diagrams to find out about the Sun and the STEREO spacecraft monitoring it. And check out our scientists’ profiles too.

Temperature Blast is a Maryland Science Center C3 Citizen Science project designed to introduce participants to methods of studying climate. Citizen Scientists collect live and archive Weatherbug data from select stations in the Baltimore region to compare temperatures and log this data for scientists.

Scientists at the Baltimore Ecosystem Study then use this data to test models of temperature patterns across the city to aid in urban planning. This data illustrates the Urban Heat Island effect on the area, a phenomenon classified by temperature differences between a metropolitan area and more rural landscape nearby. An Urban Heat Island is not an effect of climate change, but rather of our activity shaping the environment around us.

Using either this website or our Smartphone application (available free of charge for both iPhone and Android) Citizen Scientists submit temperature data from six weather stations in the Baltimore region. The purpose of this is to collect a stream of simultaneous data from multiple sites in and around the metropolitan area. This data, along with first-hand location observations, will be used to understand the Urban Heat Island Effect in Baltimore.

Anyone with access to the Internet and/or a Smartphone can be a Citizen Scientist and participate in Temperature Blast!? While the data obtained from the program is relevant to the Baltimore metropolitan region, there is no geographic or age restriction for Citizen Scientists.

In order to conduct a large-scale survey of urban spiders, we need the help of the public. We are asking people to collect spiders in their homes and gardens, fill out a simple data sheet about their collection, and send or bring the spiders and forms to the Natural History Museum.

In spite of their importance and abundance, we do not know much about the spiders in Los Angeles. There are no truly large collections of urban spiders from this area, as most collectors concentrate on studying natural areas.

As an important international port, new species of spiders from various parts of the world are always being accidentally introduced into the Los Angeles area, and some of these have established breeding populations. We need to know how widespread these introduced species have become, and how they have interacted with the native spiders. Also, we want to know how urbanization and the loss of natural habitat has affected populations and distributions of naturally occurring spiders.

In the late 1990′s, bee biologists started to notice a decline in the abundance and distribution of several wild bumble bee species. Three of these species (western bumble bee, rusty patched bumble bee, yellowbanded bumble bee) were once very common and important crop pollinators over their ranges. Franklin’s bumble bee was historically found only in a small area in southern Oregon and northern California, and it may now be extinct. A recent study led by Sydney Cameron, Ph.D., has also drawn attention to a rapid decline of the American bumble bee.

We are very interested in tracking the status of these five bumble bee species and finding out where current populations are situated. If you have seen any of these bees please send us a photo. If you are interested in finding out more, would like to see the historical distribution of these bumble bees, or would like to know how to identify them, please visit our website.

We are also interested in collecting information about bumble bee nesting habits. Please let us know if you have found one.

SETILive is an exciting new project in which volunteers try to detect extraterrestrial signals from space.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) uses images from the Allen Telescope Array and powerful computer algorithms to search for these signals automatically. However, the computer algorithms have a hard time distinguishing between signals that might be extraterrestrial and those that are from earth. This is where you come in!

Researchers need your help to find interesting signals in all that noise. Eventually, they want to learn whatever tricks you use to do your classifications, so they can teach their computer algorithms to do the same thing.

The Your Wild Life team needs citizen scientists to go boldly where few have gone before -- into the life-filled ecosystem of your house!

The species in and around our households are interesting intrinsically. They are the ones we interact with most often, and they are the species among which evolution is likely proceeding most rapidly. These species living on and beside us are also interesting for another very important reason: their presence and absence may directly influence our health and wellbeing.

Yet curiously scientists have dedicated relatively little attention to understanding the ecology and evolution of the species that live alongside us, be they bacteria, fungi, or insects…until now.

With simple sampling devices, statistical wherewithal, and the ability to detect invisible species using genetic methods, scientists now have the tools and techniques necessary for domestic exploration. But they're missing one very important member of our team: YOU.

With an easy-to-use sampling kit, you can help research test a handful of hypotheses related to microbial wild life in and around you home.

The Your Wild Life team needs citizen scientists to share observations and photos of camel crickets in your home!

To date, their network of keen citizen observers has reported a preponderance of camel crickets in their basements, garages and garden sheds. Some interesting patterns in cricket distribution have emerged, and the researchers have learned that a Japanese camel cricket is way more common in the US than previously thought.

Have you seen one of these leggy beasts? Submit your observations today!

With AlmereGrid you can donate your unused computing time to science. We are located in the Netherlands and support Dutch - and other European universities. Currently we run medical applications from the Erasmus MC - an academic hospital in Rotterdam. We try to communicate in Dutch as much as possible with our volunteers.

Bumble bees are important pollinators, and science needs YOUR help to conserve them. You can contribute to our knowledge of bumble bees and their lives all over the world. Your contribution will tell us about which bumble bees live where, the flowers they visit, and when they're active during the year.

The photo group is administered by Athena Rayne Anderson, a doctoral candidate in Ecology at the University of Georgia, and author of the website.

EyeWire is a citizen science project aimed at mapping the neural connections of the retina. All you have to do is play a relaxing and absorbing game of coloring brain images!

In the game, participants reconstruct the tree-like shapes of the neurons in the retina. By tracing branches throughout images, you can help the computer develop 3-D reconstructions of the neurons.

Anyone can participate – you don’t need any specialized knowledge of neuroscience – and your contributions will help scientists understand how the brain functions. In addition, engineers will also use your input to improve the computational technology that powers the game. This will eventually lead to making software that can detect brain abnormalities that are related to disorders like autism and schizophrenia.

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is offering a new online
course for educators focused on its successful citizen science program – *PBB
- 501 Project BudBurst: Introduction to Plant Phenology and Climate Change.
* This inaugural offering is *being offered at no charge *to K-12 educators
and is suited for both formal and informal educational settings. This
online course provides all needed information to implement Project BudBurst
(www.budburst.org) in the classroom and engage your students in a national
program by learning more about plants and climate change at a local level.

Act now and be part of the first online course from The BudBurst Academy
that begins on February 15 and take advantage of the *registration fee
being waived*.

Involvement in Project BudBurst will give students valuable experience
collecting data and will give them the opportunity to make meaningful
contributions to ongoing scientific research where scientists are very
interested in the observations students across the county are making.

This professional development course will provide you with detailed
information on Project BudBurst and how to participate including how to
select your plants and make observations, suggestions for structuring your
classroom involvement, classroom activities to engage your students in
making observations, analyzing data, as well as forming a community with
other K-12 educators within Project BudBurst.

Participants in PBB - 501 can sign up for optional graduate level
continuing education credits from Colorado School of Mines. The fee for 2
credits is $90.00

More information can be found at www.budburst.org/academy

Humans shed about 1.5 million microscopic skin cells, and ten times as many bacterial cells, every hour. These cells are transferred to numerous surfaces in a home via touch. What type of biological impression are we leaving on our home environments? If you are moving to a new home soon, then we need your help to find out.

We are looking for 20 people (four individual bachelors or bachelorettes between 18-30, four couples between 25-65, and two families with couples between 35-45 and two children 15 years old or younger) to participate in our study. Those relocating within the Chicagoland area are preferred, but all are welcome to apply. Households with cats, dogs, or uncaged birds are not eligible.

The goal of this study is to collect and examine the unique biological material shed by individuals throughout the normal course of a day to determine how rapidly their unique community of bacteria - called a microbiome - is established in their new home environment.

This study examines microbiota associated with the hands, feet, and nose of each individual, as well as those present on the most-often used doorknobs, light switches, floors, and countertops. You collect the data! ***This material is collected using swabs every other day for two weeks prior to moving, and four weeks following a move into a new home.*** All collection and storage materials will be provided to you. The research team will also ask you to note your cleaning schedule and some basic information about guests and visitors to the home for one month after moving in.

The results of this study will demonstrate the way in which we interact with the living surfaces of our home, and the fundamental impact humans have on the composition of microbes in their houses. The experimental design allows for a detailed examination of variables that make up the home environment, such as temperature and moisture, and how they favor different types of microbes shed by the human inhabitants.

The Milky Way Project aims to sort and measure our galaxy. We're asking you to help us find and draw bubbles in beautiful infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Understanding the cold, dusty material that we see in these images, helps scientists to learn how stars form and how our galaxy changes and evolves with time.

Marine scientists need your help to categorize the complex calls of Killer Whales (Orcas) and Pilot Whales and to understand what the calls mean.

Whales and dolphins make sophisticated sounds that play a critical role in communicating, orienting in the ocean environment, and locating food. Scientists have already begun to categorize Killer Whale calls; however, Pilot Whale calls are much less studied.

Project organizers have assembled recordings of two species from across the world's oceans and seas. Citizen scientists simply listen to individual whale calls and identify potential matching calls. Your contribution will help researchers understand what the whales are saying. You can also help discover whether certain calls are made by an individual, one group, or across broad areas.

I do research in child undernutrition and am working on a project to understand the important factors underlying child undernutrition in Fort Saint Michel – an urban slum of Cap Haitien, Haiti. We’re gearing up for a mapping exercise in Fort Saint Michel to capture the exact locations of important health-promoting and health-compromising factors in the area using GPS devices. But first, we need your help!

The problem: As you can see in the image, the commercial area of Cap Haitien is fairly well curated in Google Maps, but the densely inhabited areas of Fort Saint Michel and La Petite Anse are not.

How you can help: Street names, businesses, markets, footpaths – if you know it, we want to see it! If you have knowledge of this area of Cap Haitien, we’re asking for you to share your knowledge with the world!

Now's the time to set up your American Kestrel nest box! This bird's population is experiencing long-term declines in North America, and existing data are insufficient for understanding the causes. The American Kestrel Partnership is an international research network designed to generate data, models, and conservation plans for kestrel habitat and populations at large spatial scales. The Partnership unites the data-generating capacity of citizen scientists with the data-analysis expertise of professional scientists by promoting research collaboration among citizen scientists, universities, government agencies, conservation organizations, schools, and businesses. The Partnership also fosters long-term conservation values and appreciation of science by engaging the public with hands-on research experiences.

The goal of this project is to discover Kuiper Belt Objects with just the right orbit and just the right characteristics to make them eligible for a visit from the New Horizons mission. At this time, the space probe has enough fuel in reserve to allow up to two different objects to be visited.

This is where you come in. To find these icy KBO targets we need your help poring over thousands of ground based images, taken specially for this purpose using giant telescopes. Hiding within these images are undiscovered slow-moving Kuiper Belt Objects, asteroids zipping through the foreground, and millions of background stars.

The Flusurvey is an online system for measuring influenza trends in the UK.

In contrast to traditional surveillance methods, the Flusurvey collects data directly from the general public, rather than via hospitals or GPs. This is particularly important because many people with flu don't visit a doctor so don't feature in traditional flu surveillance.

Each week, participants report any flu-like symptoms they have experienced since their last visit. If you have no symptoms, this only takes a few seconds. We provide participants with regular updates on the epidemic, all the latest news and advice about flu.

This year, for the first time, we are coordinating with similar surveys in 9 other European countries, letting us monitor flu as it spreads across the continent. You can find out more on the "Join in" tab.

Help NASA find life on Mars by exploring the bottom of the lakes of British Columbia, Canada.

The Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) has been investigating the underwater environment with DeepWorker submersible vehicles since 2008. Now with MAPPER, you can work side-by-side with NASA scientists to explore the bottom of these lakes from the perspective of a DeepWorker pilot.

The PLRP team makes use of DeepWorker subs to explore and document freshwater carbonate formations known as microbialites that thrive in Pavilion and Kelly Lake. Many scientists believe that a better understanding of how and where these rare microbialite formations develop will lead to deeper insights into where signs of life may be found on Mars and beyond. To investigate microbialite formation in detail, terabytes of video footage and photos of the lake bottom are recorded by PLRP's DeepWorker sub pilots. This data must be analyzed to determine what types of features can be found in different parts of the lake. Ultimately, detailed maps can be generated to help answer questions like "how does microbialite texture and size vary with depth?" and "why do microbialites grow in certain parts of the lake but not in others?". But before these questions can be answered, all the data must be analyzed.

Count birds within a 15-foot area, anywhere in the Western states, for one hour on Thanksgiving Day; you decide the hour and the location.
Last year 431 counters in the eleven Western States and Alaska made 440 counts. They tallied 161 species of birds (plus a lot of mammals and other things, too). The top five species counted in these states were House Sparrow (1), Dark-eyed Junco (2), House Finch (3), Black-capped Chickadee (4) and European Starling (5). As predicted, the Pine Siskin dropped out of the top five last season, but should be more numerous this year. Participants should send in a report even if no birds were seen during the hour.

Harsh winter conditions significantly affect young turkeys. New York State Department of Environmental Conservation seeks wildlife lovers in every county to help them observe and count young male and female turkeys (also known as Jakes and Jennies), from January 2012 through March 2012.

N.H. Fish and Game's winter wild turkey flock survey invites you to help record sightings of wild turkey flocks in New Hampshire from January to mid-March each year. This effort helps biologists assess the impact of winter weather on our turkey population!

Constellation is a platform for different aerospace related projects that need intensive computational power. The platform supports the efforts of participating projects by providing Distributed Computation capability using BOINC (Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing).

Constellation will send work-units of attached projects to volunteering, idle PCs where the units are processed. The combined power of all volunteering users will help to solve important scientific tasks in fields from astronomy to aerospace-engineering beginning from student up to university projects. The bottom line is to benefit from the generosity of the volunteers and to benefit from the accumulation of different projects, like sharing programming knowledge in distributed computing and influencing the others' simulation by its own solutions.

The platform is an open space for anyone, who is an air and space enthusiast and wants to donate idle computing time or even skill for a sub-project on platform. Applications for sub-project are welcome!

SOHO is the most successful comet discoverer in history, having found over one thousand eight-hundred comets in over thirteen years of operation! What's even more impressive is that the majority of these comets have been found by amateur astronomers and enthusiasts from all over the world, scouring the images for a likely comet candidate from the comfort of their own home.

Absolutely anyone can join this project -- all you need is an internet connection and plenty of free time!

The School of Ants project is a citizen-scientist driven study of the ants that live in urban areas, particularly around homes and schools. Collection kits are available to anyone interested in participating.

Teachers, students, parents, kids, junior-scientists, senior citizens and enthusiasts of all stripes are involved in collecting ants in schoolyards and backyards using a standardized protocol so that project coordinators can make detailed maps of the wildlife that lives just outside their doorsteps.

The maps that are created with these data are telling us quite a lot about native and introduced ants in cities, not just here in North Carolina, but across the United States and, as this project grows, about the ants of the world!

Help identify and catalog the trees in Philadelphia's urban forest! PhillyTreeMap is an open-source, web-based map database of trees in the greater 13-county 3-state Philadelphia region. The wiki-style database enables non-profits, government, volunteer organizations, and the general public to collaboratively create an accurate and informative inventory of the trees in their communities. The project was funded by a USDA Small Business Innovation Research Grant and is in support of the Philadelphia Parks & Recreation's 30% tree canopy goal and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's "Plant One Million" campaign. As more trees are added to the database, PhillyTreeMap uses the iTree software from the USDA Forest Service to calculate the environmental impact of the region's urban forest. So get outside and add some trees!

The Oklahoma Invasive Plant council needs Oklahoma residents to report data on invasive plants in their area.

Participants gather information about the invading species and its location, and then submit it on the project website.

By contributing, you can help the project facilitate management of invasive plants and protect the economic and natural resources of Oklahoma’s land and water.

In the Health Tracking Network, people across the world work together to monitor common illnesses and discover factors related to illness.

When you join the Health Tracking Network, you:
* spend 2-3 minutes per week answering questions about cold and flu symptoms and other topics;
* earn money for charities of your choice; and
* can track your own health, fitness, or anything of interest to you with separate tracking tools.

The Health Tracking Network has no ads, and participation is free and completely anonymous.

We seek volunteers from across the world. You must be 18 years or older to participate.

Download and play the ACTUV Tactics Simulator and submit your results to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Your results will help develop the future of anti-submarine warfare.

Think you can best an enemy submarine commander so he can’t escape into the ocean depths?

If you think you can, you are invited to put yourself into the virtual driver’s seat of one of several Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) configurations and show the world how you can use its capabilities to follow an enemy submarine.

DARPA’s ACTUV program is developing a fundamentally new tool for the Navy’s ASW toolkit and seeks your help to explore how best to use this tool to track quiet submarines. Before autonomous software is developed for ACTUV’s computers, DARPA needs to determine what approaches and methods are most effective. To gather information from a broad spectrum of users, ACTUV has been integrated into the Dangerous WatersTM game. DARPA is offering this new ACTUV Tactics Simulator for free public download.

This software has been written to simulate actual evasion techniques used by submarines, challenging each player to track them successfully. Your tracking vessel is not the only ship at sea, so you’ll need to safely navigate among commercial shipping traffic as you attempt to track the submarine, whose driver has some tricks up his sleeve.

Give it a try!

Phylo is a game in which participants align sequences of DNA by shifting and moving puzzle pieces. Your score depends on how you arrange these pieces. You will be competing against a computer and other players in the community.

Though it may appear to be just a game, Phylo is actually a framework for harnessing the computing power of mankind to solve a common problem -- Multiple Sequence Alignments.

A sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA or protein to identify regions of similarity. These similarities may be consequences of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. From such an alignment, biologists may infer shared evolutionary origins, identify functionally important sites, and illustrate mutation events. More importantly, biologists can trace the source of certain genetic diseases.

Traditionally, multiple sequence alignment algorithms use computationally complex heuristics to align the sequences. Unfortunately, the use of heuristics do not guarantee global optimization as it would be prohibitively computationally expensive to achieve an optimal alignment. This is due in part to the sheer size of the genome, which consists of roughly three billion base pairs, and the increasing computational complexity resulting from each additional sequence in an alignment.

Humans have evolved to recognize patterns and solve visual problems efficiently. By abstracting multiple sequence alignment to manipulating patterns consisting of coloured shapes, we have adapted the problem to benefit from human capabilities. By taking data which has already been aligned by a heuristic algorithm, we allow the user to optimize where the algorithm may have failed.

All alignments were generously made available through UCSC Genome Browser. In fact, all alignments contain sections of human DNA which have been speculated to be linked to various genetic disorders, such as breast cancer. Every alignment is received, analyzed, and stored in a database, where it will eventually be re-introduced back into the global alignment as an optimization.

Let's play!

Wildlife Health Event Reporter (WHER) is an online, experimental reporting system for reporting and sharing the sightings of sick or dead wildlife.

Individual reports viewed together can lead to the detection and containment of wildlife disease outbreaks that may pose a health risk to people, domestic animals and other wildlife. For smart phone users, the HealthMap mobile phone application, Outbreaks Near Me, is also available. It captures the same information that the web-based WHER application collects and allows users to upload photos. WHER hopes to harness the power of the many eyes of the public to better detect wildlife disease phenomenon.

Additionally, WHER was developed by the Wildlife Data Integration Network (WDIN), a program of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in partnership with the USGS National Wildlife Health Center.

FrogWatch USA Chapters are overseen by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and are hosted and managed by zoos, aquariums, and like-minded organizations.

At a training session hosted by a local chapter, volunteers will learn to identify local frog and toad species by their calls during the breeding season and how to report their findings accurately. By mastering these skills, volunteers gain increased experience and control over asking and answering scientific questions which, in turn, augments science literacy, facilitates conservation action and stewardship, and increases knowledge of amphibians.

Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

SKYWARN is a national network of volunteer severe weather spotters. The spotters are trained by local National Weather Service Forecast Offices on how to spot severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail, and flooding. In some parts of the country, spotters also report snowfall and ice accumulation.

During hazardous weather, such as severe thunderstorms, floods, tornadoes, snow and ice storms, SKYWARN volunteers report what is happening at their location. They are asked to report whenever certain criteria are met such as when one inch of rain has fallen, four inches of snow is on the ground, a thunderstorm is producing hail, or trees have been blown down.

Reports arrive at the forecaster's office via the telephone, fax, Internet, and amateur radio. The reports are combined with radar and satellite data to determine what the storms will do next. Spotters provide the "ground-truth" to forecasters. Radar may tell us that heavy snow is falling, but it can not tell us how much snow is on the ground or if rain is mixing with the snow. Spotters do. The reports are used by forecasters to send out public statements, warnings and advisories, and short-term forecasts.

Two-thirds of SKYWARN volunteers are licensed amateur radio operators. Amateur radio plays a big role in the SKYWARN program. During severe weather, amateur radio volunteers man a radio station at our office. They talk to our spotters in the particular area that a storm is hitting and request information needed by the forecasters such as hail size or rainfall accumulation. Large storms such as hurricanes can knock out phone service. SKYWARN amateur radio volunteers help us when there are communications outages so that we can continue to receive weather reports and feed warnings and other critical information out to communities.

SKYWARN volunteers are people who either have a strong interest in weather or are public service oriented. This includes amateur radio operators, REACT members, or emergency response personnel. Our spotters are all ages beginning as young as 14 and range well into retirement age. We have farmers, pilots, engineers, housewives, lawyers, television cameramen, teachers, students, firemen, and more. Our volunteers are truly diverse but with a common interest in weather and a strong desire to help their community.

CitSci.org is a platform that supports a variety of citizen science programs using a centralized database to store and deliver science data, with a focus on community based monitoring programs. This platform allows program coordinators to create their own projects and datasheets, manage members, define measurements, create analyses, and even write feedback forms.

Map habitat in backyards, parks, and schools. Work towards more sustainable landscapes. The YardMap network lets you draw your landscapes with a beautiful online mapping tool and helps you learn about how to use your outdoor spaces (big or small) to aid birds and other wildlife. Connect to other citizen scientists, solve problems, share your maps and good ideas all while helping to build an invaluable database of habitat data for Cornell Lab of Ornithology Scientists.

The Acoustics Research Centre at the University of Salford is building a sound map of the world as part of a new study into how sounds in our everyday environment make us feel. We need your help!

We’re asking people across the world to use our new iOS app on their iPhones or iPads (or any recorder) to record short clips from different sound environments, or "soundscapes"--anything from the inside of a family car to a busy shopping centre. Then we ask volunteers to comment on their soundscapes and upload them to our virtual soundscape map.

Recordings and responses will be analyaed by acoustic scientists, and significant findings will be reported on this website.

Sound Around You aims to raise awareness of how our soundscape influences us, and could have far reaching implications for professions and social groups ranging from urban planners to house buyers.

The Great Lakes Worm Watch needs citizen scientists to conduct earthworm surveys in forests and other habitats anywhere in North America.

Earthworms are not native to the Great Lakes Region; they were all wiped out after the last glaciation. The current population, brought here by early Europeans, is slowly changing the face of our native forests, but very little is known about the distributions of earthworm and earthworm species across the region. While valuable, this type of information is labor-intensive, and it is difficult for researchers to get funding to do this kind of work. Citizen scientists can help.

There are several ways to get involved:

1. Document earthworm occurrences: This involves collecting and sending earthworm specimens with location information to Great Lakes Worm Watch. These specimens will be archived at the University of Minnesota, and the species and location information will be added to the project database.

2. Collect habitat data: Great Lakes Worm Watch would like data from all habitat types, especially natural ecosystems like forests, woodlands, and prairies. In addition, data from habitats dominated by human activity are also of value, such as farm fields, pastures, and parks. Depending on your level of interest and expertise, you can choose to conduct a general or detailed habitat survey. You can use the instructions and data sheets developed by the project coordinators to make the data easily transferable to the database.

3. Conduct soil surveys: In addition to earthworm and habitat data, Great Lakes Worm Watch is also interested in getting data about the soil conditions at sites in which you sampled for earthworms. You can use the instructions and data sheet developed by project coordinators to make the data easily transferable to the database.

Get started! Anyone can make a BIG difference when it comes to containing the spread of exotic earthworms!

The Bird Conservation Network Census needs citizen scientists to record bird distribution and abundance information for birds in the Chicago region.

Bird monitors can participate at different levels:

- If you have a special interest in a particular site, you can become a regular monitor at that site and keep a year-round watch on the birds that nest, winter, or migrate through that site.

- You may help track changes in nesting populations by conducting point count surveys during the breeding season.

- You may visit a site during the nesting season and record numbers and species of birds just as you would on a Christmas Count.

- If you do not have the time to become a regular site monitor, you can still contribute your sightings.

The Bird Conservation Network has created a set of standardized methods for studying the birds of the Chicago Wilderness region. These methods can serve a variety of research purposes while also allowing birders to participate at different levels of intensity. Participants commit to making five or more visits to the site each year with at least two of those visits coming during breeding season (June). Also, participants should be able to recognize Illinois birds by sight and sound. By general rule, a birder should have about at least three years of experience with field identification of birds in the Illinois area.

The goals of this study are to generate a general picture of bird distribution in the region, to collect data to assist land managers and conservation planners in decision making, and to create a database compatible with other types of habitat data being gathered in the region which can be used by researchers investigating specific ecosystem questions. If you are an avid birder at a Chicago Park District nature area, you are encouraged to become a bird monitor.

Bird Atlas 2007-11 needs volunteers in the United Kingdom to help produce maps of distribution and relative abundance for all bird species that breed and winter in the area.

Bird atlases provide a fascinating periodic insight into the status of all of the bird species of an area. This project will allow researchers to assess changes in bird distributions since previous breeding atlases in 1970 and 1990, and since the last winter atlas of the early 1980s. Atlases have been immensely important for furthering bird knowledge and conservation, and Bird Atlas 2007-11 is destined to set the agenda for the next decades of ornithology in Britain and Ireland.

Fieldwork will span four winters and four breeding seasons, starting November 1, 2007, and concluding in 2011. There are two ways in which you can help:

1. Timed Tetrad Visits - record all the birds you see and hear in a 2km x 2km square. Visit for an hour or more in the winter and breeding season.

2. Roving Records - any bird, anytime, anywhere. If you see it, record it, and, the project coordinators will map it.

The Bird Atlas is a huge project that will synthesize millions of individual bird records. Don't miss this chance to make an important contribution.

Bird Ringing at the British Trust for Ornithology is a network of more than 2,500 trained and licensed volunteers in the United Kingdom that ring--or tag--more than 900,000 birds every year.

Bird ringing involves the fitting of small, uniquely numbered metal rings on the legs of birds. By identifying these birds as individuals, researchers can start to understand changes in the survival and movements of bird populations.

Bird ringers come in many types, from individuals working in urban areas to large groups working in a wide geographic area, and can start at any age. Though you definitely don’t need to be a bird expert to ring, it does help if you have some prior bird knowledge. Anyone who wants to participate in the project will need to gain field experience with a qualified trainer.

You’ll no doubt find that ringing is a very satisfying activity. Not only will you be adding to 100 years of data used directly by conservationists, but you will also enjoy the experience of seeing birds close up. Whether you want to train to ring birds in nest boxes, gardens, or a local gravel pit, your contribution is vital to the project's success.

BirdTrack is a free, online bird recording system for birdwatchers to store and manage their own records from anywhere in Britain and Ireland. Everyone with an interest in birds can get involved by recording when and where they watched birds then completing a list of the species seen and heard during the trip.

Exciting real-time outputs are generated by BirdTrack, including species reporting rate graphs and animated maps of sightings, all freely-available online. The data collected are used by researchers to investigate migration movements and distributions of birds and to support species conservation at local, national and international scales.

BirdTrack is year-round and ongoing, making it an ideal project for getting children enthused about birds and migration. Teachers are encouraged to add their school grounds as a BirdTrack site then help their students to record the birds they see and hear.

The success of BirdTrack relies on YOU. Get started today!

The Salish Sea Hydrophone Network needs volunteers to help monitor the critical habitat of endangered Pacific Northwest killer whales by detecting orca sounds and measuring ambient noise levels. Volunteers are especially needed to help notify researchers when orcas are in the Salish Sea, which encompasses the waters of Puget Sound and the surrounding area.

Sponsored by a coalition of organizations, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Whale Museum in Olympia, Washington, the network consists of five hydrophones, each hooked up to a computer to analyze the signal and stream it via the internet.

Even though software is used to distinguish animal from other underwater sound, human ears do a better job. So volunteers monitor the network from their home computers anywhere in the world, and alert the rest of the network when they hear whale sounds. Sometimes boats or onshore monitors are deployed to observe the whales while they are making sounds. Researchers hope to learn more about the uses of orca communications and whale migration patterns.

BeakGeek allows citizen scientists to share information about birds and bird sightings using freely available and simple social networking tools such as Twitter. BeakGeek adds value to the data created with these tools by providing map based visualizations and monitoring for terms such as "Rare Bird Alert".

The Monarch Larva Monitoring Project enlists citizen scientists to collect long-term data on larval monarch populations and milkweed habitat.

Developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota, the project aims to better understand how and why monarch populations vary in time and space, with a focus on monarch distribution and abundance during the breeding season in North America.

As a volunteer, you can participate in two ways: You can commit to regularly monitoring a specific patch of milkweed or you can submit anecdotal observations. If you commit to regular monitoring, you'll conduct weekly monarch and milkweed surveys, measuring per plant densities of monarch eggs and larvae. You'll also be able to participate in more detailed optional activities, such as measuring parasitism rates and milkweed quality. Your contributions will aid in conserving monarchs and their threatened migratory phenomenon, and will advance our understanding of butterfly ecology in general.

In addition to contributing to an understanding of monarch biology, you'll gain hands-on experience in scientific research. Through this experience, we hope that your appreciation and understanding of monarchs, monarch habitat, and the scientific process are enhanced.

The Mastodon Matrix Project needs citizen volunteers to analyze actual samples of matrix (the dirt) from a 14,000 year old mastodon excavated in New York! Learn the process of science and work like a paleontologist on real research material!

Volunteers sort through the matrix to find shells, bones, hair, pieces of plants, and rocks from the time when the mastodons lived and roamed the Earth. The matrix and discoveries are then sent back to the Paleontological Research Institution, where they will be cataloged and further analyzed by paleontologists to help scientists form a true picture of the ecology and environment of the late Pleistocene.

Mastodons are extinct relatives of modern elephants. Mastodons were numerous and widespread in North America up until around 10,000 years ago, when they became extinct--with many other species--at the end of the last glacial period.

Celebrate Urban Birds provides an opportunity for everyone across the country to watch birds and participate in activities focused on birds and neighborhood habitat improvement.

Participants learn about 16 species of birds and watch an area about the size of half a basketball court for 10 minutes to see if they can find any of those birds. Urban Bird Celebration provides all of the necessary materials to get you started.

An important part of the celebration is to help scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology collect information about the 16 key species of urban birds. The scientists have created a project that will use data collected from participants in the celebration to study these resident and migratory birds - their numbers, their behavior, their interaction with the urban habitat.

Join us in the search for interstellar dust! On January 15, 2006, the Stardust spacecraft's sample return capsule parachuted gently onto the Utah desert. Nestled within the capsule were precious particles collected during Stardust's dramatic encounter with comet Wild 2 in January of 2004; and something else, even rarer and no less precious: tiny particles of interstellar dust that originated in distant stars, light-years away. They are the first such pristine particles ever collected in space, and scientists are eagerly waiting for their chance to "get their hands" on them.

Before they can be studied, though, these tiny interstellar grains will have to be found. This will not be easy. Unlike the thousand of particles of varying sizes collected from the comet, scientists estimate that Stardust collected only around 45 interstellar dust particles. They are tiny - only about a micron (a millionth of a meter) in size! These miniscule particles are embedded in an aerogel collector 1,000 square centimeters in size. To make things worse, the collector plates are interspersed with flaws, cracks, and an uneven surface. All this makes the interstellar dust particles extremely difficult to locate.

This is where you come in!

By asking for help from talented volunteers like you from all over the world, we can do this project in months instead of years. Of course, we can't invite hundreds of people to our lab to do this search-we only have two microscopes! To find the elusive particles , therefore, we are using an automated scanning microscope to automatically collect images of the entire Stardust interstellar collector at the Curatorial Facility at Johnson Space Center in Houston. We call these stacks of images focus movies. All in all there will be nearly a million such focus movies. These are available to Stardust@home users like you around the world. You can then view them with the aid of a special Virtual Microscope (VM) that works in your web browser.

Together, you and thousands of other Stardust@home participants will find the first pristine interstellar dust particles ever brought to Earth!

In recognition of the critical importance of the Stardust@home volunteers, the discoverer of an interstellar dust particle will appear as a co-author on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home team announcing the discovery of the particle. The discoverer will also have the privilege of naming the particle!

Physics Songs aims to be the world's premier website devoted to collecting and organizing all songs about physics. It is managed by Walter F. Smith, Professor of Physics at Haverford College.

Songs about physics can help students to remember critical concepts and formulas, but perhaps more importantly they communicate the lesson that physics can be fun. They certainly help to establish an informal classroom atmosphere, in which even shy students are willing to ask questions.

The songs may also activate a different part of the students' brains.

Students’ Cloud Observations On-Line (S’COOL) is a citizen science project in which volunteers make and report cloud observations from sites of their choosing, such as a field trip, vacation, or even a backyard. The project aims to collect data on cloud type, height, cover, and related conditions from all over the world. Observations are sent to NASA for comparison to similar information obtained from satellite.

Many people take for granted how powerful clouds are in our atmosphere. It is clouds, in part, that affect the overall temperature and energy balance of the Earth. The more that scientists know about clouds, the more they will know about our Earth as a system. The S'COOL observations help validate satellite data and give a more complete picture of clouds in the atmosphere and their interactions with other parts of the integrated global Earth system. Citizens benefit from their participation in a real-world science experiment and from their access to a variety of background material. Educational materials for teachers are also available.

The Perfect Pitch Test is a study to determine whether absolute pitch differs systematically for different timbres. Your participation involves a brief survey and a pitch-naming test and will make an important contribution to auditory research.

Do you have absolute pitch, the ability to identify or recreate a musical note without any reference? If so, researchers at the Perfect Pitch Test need your help.

The Great Sunflower Project uses data collected by citizen scientists to produce the first real map of the state of the bees.

Some bee populations have experienced severe declines that may affect food production. However, nobody has ever measured how much pollination is happening over a region, much less a continent, so there is little information about how a decline in the bee population can influence gardens.

The Great Sunflower Project makes it easy to gather this information. Plant a seed or two, spend 15 minutes watching your flowers for bee visits, and send in your data. You can make as many observations as you want while your flowers are in bloom. Plant, Watch, Enter. Repeat. That's it. And, who doesn't like sunflowers?!

The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual four-day event during which bird watchers count birds to create a real-time snapshot of where birds are located across the continent.

Scientists and bird enthusiasts can learn a lot by knowing where birds are. Unfortunately, no single scientist or team of scientists could hope to document the complex distribution and movements of so many species in such a short time.

Anyone, from beginning bird watchers to experts, can participate in the The Great Backyard Bird Count. It takes as little as 15 minutes on one day, or you can count for as long as you like during each day of the event. It’s free, fun, and easy, and it helps the birds. In addition, yearly data collection makes the information more meaningful and allows scientists to investigate far-reaching questions.

Stellar Classification Online Public Exploration needs the help of citizen scientists to observe and classify stars never before classified. The goal is to mine data from photographic images of star spectra, which result from light absorption in the outer surface of a star. Star spectra are made available online where citizen scientists can compare them to stars with known spectra.

Don't wait--be the first to classify one of hundreds of thousands of stars that have never been seen before!

Project Squirrel is calling all citizen scientists to count the number of squirrels in their neighborhoods and report their findings. The goal is to understand urban squirrel biology, including everything from squirrels to migratory birds, nocturnal mammals, and secretive reptiles and amphibians. To gain data on squirrel populations across the United States, citizen scientists will also be asked, when possible, to distinguish between two different types of tree squirrels - gray and fox.

Anyone can participate in Project Squirrel. No matter where you live, city or suburb, from the Midwest to the East Coast, Canada to California, if squirrels live in your neighborhood, you are encouraged to become a squirrel monitor.

The scientists at Project Squirrel will also use this project to understand the effect that participation in citizen science has on participants. By contributing to Project Squirrel and documenting your experience, you can provide valuable information that will eventually be used to recruit other citizen scientists.

The Citizen Weather Observer Program is a group of ham radio operators and other private citizens around the country who have volunteered the use of their weather data for education, research, and use by interested parties. There are currently over 8,000 registered members worldwide and over 500 different user organizations. Their weather data are used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and distributed to user organizations.

The Citizen Weather Observer Program is a public-private partnership with three main goals:

1. Collect weather data contributed by citizens
2. Make these data available for weather services and homeland security
3. Provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality.

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.

We’re collecting data to find out if humans' pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!

Knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small protein can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers.

Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory needs YOUR help with a research project!

If you live in the area shown on the map, the Precipitation Identification Near the Ground project (PING) wants YOU to watch and report on precipitation type.

PING is looking for young, old, and in-between volunteers to make observations—teachers, classes and families too! We have collected tens of thousands of observations since 2006, already making PING successful because of your help.

PING volunteers can spend a little or a lot of time making observations. The basic idea is simple: the National Severe Storms Laboratory will collect radar data from NEXRAD radars in your area during storm events, and compare that data with YOUR observations.

Why? Because the radars cannot see close to the ground, we need YOU to tell us what is happening. Scientists will compare your report with what the radar has detected, and develop new radar technologies and techniques to determine what kind of precipitation—such as snow, soft hail, hard hail, or rain—is falling where.

The Dark Sky Meter (available for iPhones) allows citizen scientists to contribute to a global map of nighttime light pollution. Light pollution is a growing problem in urban environments, but now you can help scientists better understand its effects on the environment. By utilizing the camera built in to your iPhone, the Dark Sky Meter actually measures ‘skyglow’ and updates the data in real time.

The Pro version of the app also charts weather conditions and cloud cover so you can take readings at optimal times. The app is as easy to use as taking a picture, and is a fun way to learn about your night sky.

How many stars can you see where you live? The Loss of the Night App (available for Android devices) challenges citizen scientists to identify as many stars as they can in order to measure light pollution. The app is fun and easy to use, and helps users learn constellations as they contribute to a global real-time map of light pollution.

Stargazing is a fantastic way to engage young scientists, but this ancient past time has become increasingly difficult in growing urban areas. Help scientists understand the effects of light pollution and learn about your night sky!

You don't need to leave the city to take part, in fact, the app is designed specifically for use in very polluted areas.

The more stars you observe, and the more often you run the app, the more precise the data for your location will become. As the seasons change so do the stars in the sky, and since there aren't so many very bright stars it is extremely helpful if urban users do measurements in each season.

iPhone users can contribute their own data via the dark sky meter project: http://www.scistarter.com/project/802-Dark%20Sky%20Meter

Anyone without a phone can take part during some parts of the year via GLOBE at Night: http://www.scistarter.com/project/169-GLOBE%20at%20Night

CyberTracker Conservation is a non-profit organisation that promotes the vision of a Worldwide Environmental Monitoring Network. Our ultimate vision is that smart phone users worldwide will use CyberTracker to capture observations on a daily basis.

CyberTracker is the most efficient method of gps field data collection. You can use CyberTracker on a Smartphone or handheld computer to record any type of observation. CyberTracker, which requires no programming skills, allows you to customize an Application for your own data collection needs.

The Marine Debris Tracker mobile application allows you to help make a difference by checking in when you find trash on our coastlines and waterways. Data you submit is available to download online and you also have access to mapping all data, worldwide. Marine Debris Tracker is a joint partnership of the NOAA Marine Debris Division and the Southeast Atlantic Marine Debris Initiative (SEA-MDI), located within the College of Engineering at the University of Georgia.

FoxPop is a public science engagement project which aims to get Dublin citizens involved in a city-wide collection of data on urban foxes. Despite their presence all over the capital, little or no research has been carried out in terms of numbers. Please help us by submitting any sightings, locations, dates and times if you please.

WNYC invites families, armchair scientists and lovers of nature to join in a bit of mass science: track the cicadas that emerge once every 17 years across New Jersey, New York and the whole Northeast by building homemade sensors and reporting your observations.

Magicicada Brood II will make its 17-year appearance when the ground 8" down is a steady 64° F. Help predict the arrival by planting a homemade temperature sensor in the ground and reporting your findings back to to WNYC. Your observations will be put on a map and shared with the entire community.

Help the Large Pelagics Research Center improve scientific understanding of large pelagic species by catching, measuring and releasing juvenile bluefin with conventional “spaghetti”-ID tags.

The LPRC initiated its Tag A Tiny program in 2006 to study the annual migration paths and habitat use of juvenile Atlantic bluefin tuna.

As of 2012, 1258 recreational fishermen have helped LPRC to tag 1,645 bluefin, mostly juveniles from 1-4 years old, and some “medium” size fish, nearing 70 inches. All of the records are entered into the Billfish Foundation, NMFS, and ICCAT databases.

A study was conducted 40 years ago which suggested a link between climate and when west-European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) come out of hibernation. Last year we repeated this study and over two thousand people logged around 45,000 hedgehogs across Britain. The unusual weather in 2012 has made patterns of activity quite confusing so we are repeating the survey this year to find out more.

We need your help to collect hedgehog records from 1st February until 31st August 2013. Understanding patterns of hedgehog behaviour across the UK will enable us to target the conservation strategy for this charming animal, which is currently in severe decline.

The iSeeChange Almanac is a socially networked weather Almanac for communities to collectively journal their climate experiences -- their observations, feelings, questions, and decisions --- against near-real time climate information.

Founded in April 2012 in Western Colorado, iSeeChange is a public radio and media experiment that fosters multimedia conversations between citizens and scientists about how seasonal weather and climate extremes affect daily American life. From the earliest spring recorded in the history of the United States, a landmark wildfire season, nationwide droughts, and weather records breaking everyday, climate affects every citizen and binds communities together.

iSeeChange is produced by Julia Kumari Drapkin in Western Colorado at KVNF Mountain Grown Community Radio as a part of Localore, a nationwide production of AIR in collaboration with Zeega, with principal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

We just launched the Almanac this week in Western Colorado. Stay tuned for more locations in the coming year!

The Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab in NYC is investigating the different ways people and dogs play together, and we need your help (well, you and your dog’s help). We are cataloguing all the ways people play with their dogs and asking dog owners to submit short videos of their own dog-human play.

By participating in Project: Play with Your Dog, citizen scientists are providing valuable information into the nuances and intricacies of our relationships with dogs.

AirCasting is a platform for recording, mapping, and sharing health and environmental data using your smartphone. Each AirCasting session lets you capture real-world measurements, annotate the data to tell your story, and share it via the CrowdMap.

Using the AirCasting Android app, AirCasters can record, map, and share:
(o) sound levels recorded by their phone microphone;
(o) temperature, humidity, CO and NO2 gas concentrations recorded by the Arduino-powered AirCasting Air Monitor, and;
(o) heart rate measurements recorded by the Zephyr HxM.

Using AirCasting Luminescence, these sensor streams can also be represented using LED lights.

Help track the health and abundance of the mid-Atlantic scallop fishery!

Researchers at the University of Delaware have developed a new robot-based approach to surveying marine life the ocean floor. They use Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), which can navigate underwater without direct human control, to take photos of marine life in its natural habitat.

By becoming a SubseaObserver you'll play a roll in ocean conservation by helping organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) make better decisions about how to manage the scallop fishery now and for future generations.

As a SubseaObserver you can name your own virtual AUV and choose what part of the mid-Atlantic you'd like to explore.

SubseaObservers also includes information about scallop biology, how the fishery is managed, how AUVs work and where they're used.

IceWatch USA gives you the opportunity to help scientists study how our climate is changing. With as little as 10 minutes, you can report information that will help to analyze how our climate will change in different regions of the United States and how our ecosystems are reacting to the change.

Due to the increased emissions of greenhouse gases, among other factors, our climate is changing. Accurately recording and analyzing "ice on" and "ice off" events (also known as "ice phenology"), as well as other factors like snow depth, air temperature, and wildlife observations, offers a practical way to learn how climate change affects our environment. Even if you live in a southern state that doesn't experience ice, your winter observations of air temperature, precipitation, and wildlife are still important for the big picture.

IceWatch USA needs your help, and becoming an IceWatcher is very easy. All you need to do is:

1. Choose a location to observe over the winter, such as a nearby lake, bay, or river.
2. Record and report your observations.

Your information will be entered into a database, compared to other reports, and shared with interested scientists. IceWatch USA is also a proud partner of the National Phenology Network.

Get started today!

How much snow is on the ground where you are? Cryosphere researchers at the University of Waterloo want to know!

The Snowtweets Project provides a way for people interested in snow measurements to quickly broadcast their own snow depth measurements to the web. These data are then picked up by our database and mapped in near real time. We are especially interested in using web-based digital technologies to map snow data; currently, the project uses the micro-blogging site Twitter as its data broadcasting scheme.

To view the snow depth measurements (or Tweets), we have developed a data visualization tool called Snowbird that lets you explore the reported snow depths around the globe. The viewer shows where the reports are located and how much snow there is at each reported site.

The Snowtweets Project is in early stages of development and we plan to update and improve it as we go along. We rely on user participation to measure snow depth (including zero snow depth) and then send the measurements in.

CoCoRaHS, The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network is a unique, non-profit, community-based network of volunteers of all ages who measure and report precipitation. By using low-cost measurement tools, stressing training and education, and utilizing an interactive website, our aim is to provide the highest quality data for natural resource, education and research applications.

Each time a rain, hail, or snow storm occurs, volunteers take measurements of precipitation from their registered locations (reports of 'zero' precipitation are encouraged too!). The reports are submitted to the website and are immediately available for viewing. It's educational, but moreover, fun! Just wait until you start comparing how much rain fell in your backyard vs. your neighbor!

The data are used by the National Weather Service, meteorologists, hydrologists, emergency managers, city utilities, insurance adjusters, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, engineers, mosquito control, ranchers and farmers, outdoor and recreation interests, teachers, students, and neighbors in the community.

Bat Detective is an online citizen science project which allows visitors to the website to take part in wildlife conservation by listening out for bat calls in recordings collected all over the world.

By sorting the sounds in the recordings into insect and bat calls, bat detectives will help biologists learn how to reliably distinguish bat 'tweets' to develop new automatic identification tools.

Bats use lots of different types of sounds, from singing to each other to find a mate, to using the echoes from their tweets to find their way around. Usually bat sounds are inaudible to humans as they are too high for us to hear, but special 'time expansion' ultrasonic detectors convert these sounds to a lower frequency, and visitors to the Bat Detective website can listen to these unique recordings and help distinguish different sounds.

One out of every five species of bats is threatened with extinction and better automatic identification tools are desperately needed to quickly process vast amounts of sound data collected by volunteers from the bat monitoring programme iBats who survey bat populations each year.

Bats are found all over the world from local parks to pristine rainforests and monitoring their population trends provides an important indicator of healthy ecosystems. Developing new tools that allow biologists to interpret population trends from sound will allow bats' tweets to act as a way to track environmental change.

Bat Detective was developed at University College London, Bat Conservation Trust, Bat Life Europe with the Citizen Science Alliance.

Dictionaries have existed for centuries, but scientists still haven't worked out the exact meanings for most words. This is a serious problem if you want to train computers to understand language. If we don't know what words mean, it's hard to teach computers what they mean. It is similarly hard to understand how children come learn the meanings of words, when we don't fully understand those meanings ourselves.

Rather than try to work out the definition of a word all at once, we have broken the problem into a series of separate tasks. Each task has a fanciful backstory -- which we hope you enjoy! -- but at its heart, each task is asking about a specific component of meaning that scientists suspect makes up one of the building blocks of meaning.

You can participate for as little as a few minutes or come back to the site over and over to help code the many thousands of words in English.

You are walking along the beach on a sunny spring day. But what is that? Something is moving slowly out of the water. It looks like a large crab, covered in barnacles and mussels. Creepy? Ugly? No, its home! At least for all those critters that live on Horseshoe crabs. Horseshoe crabs have been around for more than 250 million years, unimpressed by dinosaurs and ice ages.

Since then, Horseshoe crabs have played a key role in coastal ecosystems: the eggs are eaten by shore birds, juveniles are food for sea turtles, and adults aerate the ocean floor through their digging activity.

We believe Horseshoe crabs serve another important function: as substrate for many invertebrate species such as mussels, barnacles and snails. Many marine species require hard substrates to live on, and such substrates are historically rare on the predominantly sandy beaches of the Eastern US.
In more recent times, docks and boats may offer new opportunities for intertidal species - but what about animals that do not like the tidal influence? Are there even species living on Horseshoe crabs that we have not discovered yet?

Help us decipher who lives on Horseshoe crabs! Take clear pictures of Horseshoe crabs and their when you see them on the beach, and send them to us. Just let us know when and where you saw the crab. That's it.

In return, we will post the best pictures on our website and explain every epibiont that you discovered on the Horseshoe crab. New species will be featured on the site, and we would like to name our most successful discoverers.

With your help, we will be able to address the following questions:
Which region has the highest diversity of Horseshoe crab epibionts? When are the crabs found the most? The least?
Moreover, we will build a valuable resource for school classes, beach walkers and everybody else who ever wanted to know: What is that thing sitting on this Horseshoe crab?

Horseshoe crabs come to the beaches to mate and lay eggs when the tides are highest. This happens at full and new moons. This means you will see Horseshoe crabs most likely around the following dates:
Thursday, April 25 (Full Moon)
Friday, May 10 (New Moon)
Saturday, May 25 (Full Moon)
Saturday, June 8 (New Moon)
Sunday, June 23 (Full Moon)
Saturday. July 6 (New Moon)
Monday, July 22 (Full Moon)

Citizens in Space has purchased 10 flights on the XCOR Lynx spacecraft which will be made available to the citizen-science community. Join us on May 4-5 to learn how you, or your experiment, could be on board.

We'll meet across the street (literally) from NASA Ames Research Center to learn how citizen scientists can build instruments and experiments with more power than a NASA satellite from a few years back...with components available at Radio Shack or Fry's Electronics.

The Space Hacker Workshop will provide hands-on exposure to a variety of microcontrollers, sensors, imaging systems, and other components that you can use to design and build microgravity, fluid-physics, life-science, and engineering experiments.

The workshop is a chance to connect with and learn from leaders from XCOR Aerospace, NASA Ames Research Center and open source development space experiment development platform ArduLab.

Citizens in Space project manager Edward Wright will be on hand to discuss flight opportunities for experiments and citizen astronauts, including an exclusive glimpse at citizen-astronaut training activities scheduled for this summer.

Laptops are suggested. Wifi is provided by the Hacker Dojo.

Registration is limited and includes coffee, snacks, and lunch both days.

Redmap (Range Extension Database and Mapping Project) is a citizen science project that invites members of the community to spot marine species that are outside of their usual range (or distribution) at various points around Australia. In collecting this information Redmap is generating a database of "out of range" sightings to assess which species are shifting their ranges and whether these shifts are consistent with warming waters. Redmap is hosted by the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

Young people and adults collect information on stream health and post biological, chemical and physical data, photos and videos on an interactive map. This provides information to the public, to scientists and to conservation groups about local water quality. The Creek Freaks website includes data forms and activity guides to get started monitoring aquatic macroinvertebrates (stream insects and crustaceans), water chemistry, and to take visual observations and physical measurements of the stream and streamside vegetation.

The Astro Drone game is part of a scientific crowd sourcing project. People who possess a Parrot AR drone can play the game, in which they are challenged to perform different space missions in an augmented reality. Contribute to future space exploration by playing the free Astro Drone game!

The iPhone app is more than a game. Players can choose to contribute to a scientific crowd sourcing experiment that aims to improve autonomous capabilities of space probes, such as landing, obstacle avoidance, and docking. The app processes the images made by the AR drone's camera, extracting abstract mathematical image features. These features can neither be interpreted by humans, nor can the original image be reconstructed. However, the features can be used by robots to learn how to navigate in their environment. Players can join the experiment by going to the high score table. If they agree, the feature data is sent over the Internet.

The first release contains the training level, in which players learn to dock as well as possible to the International Space Station. New levels will be added incrementally with new releases.

AstroDrone is a project performed by the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency.

Yelkouan Shearwater Project aims at determining the seasonal changes in the movements and numbers of globally threatened Puffinus yelkouan in the Marmara Sea.

It is the first research project focusing on the populations of this species passing through two important Turkish straits in the Marmara Sea. The project will provide more accurate information on the knowledge obtained by the previous research in the Bosphorus and the movement patterns of endemic Yelkouan Shearwaters will be identified through the extended study area to better understand the whole picture in the Mediterranean Basin and to take part in the global conservation of this species.

Yelkouan Shearwater Project is funded by Rufford Small Grants.

Spectral Challenge is a call to makers, hackers, and Do-It-Yourselfers worldwide to tackle real-world environmental problems with low-cost, open source spectrometry.

What if there were an affordable device you could build yourself, take into your neighborhood and use to test for heavy metals, oil contamination, or other toxics, without needing to have a PhD or access to a lab?

There are two parts to the Spectral Challenge, Stage 1: Collaboration and Stage 2: Real World Use.

Stage 1 will be awarded to the team which publishes techniques and/or documentation which most dramatically improves the process of open source spectroscopy for the whole community. Stage 1 is open now; all entries must be posted on the Public Lab site by May 31, 2013. The winning team will receive $1000 from the prize pool.

The goal of Stage 2 is to use low cost open source spectral analysis to identify an environmental contaminant such as petroleum or heavy metals. Stage 2 will start on June 5, 2013; the winner of Stage 2 will take 80% of the prize pool -- 20% will go to Public Lab to continue organizing and promoting open source science.

Spectral Challenge 2013 is like an X Prize for DIY science, but it's crowdfunded -- this means that if you really believe in the goals of the Challenge, you should back them by donating to the prize pool! You can also help by getting the word out to find pool contributions!

Join seafarers in the global scientific experiment to study marine phytoplankton.

The phytoplankton underpin the marine food chain, so we need to know as much about them as possible. To participate in this project, you'll need to create a Secchi Disk, a tool that measures water turbidity, and use the free iPhone or Android ‘Secchi’ application.

You can take a Secchi Disk reading as often as you wish, every day, once a week, twice a month, or just occasionally. The data you collect will help scientists around the world to understand the phytoplankton.

Join in and help make this the world’s largest public marine biological study.

Where are the invasive species in Maine? Where aren’t they? Students, educators, citizens, and scientists are working together to find out.

As part of the Vital Signs community you can help steward the 32,000 miles of rivers and streams, 6,000 lakes and ponds, 5,000 miles of coastline, and 17 million acres of forest that are threatened by invasive species.

Together we are using scientific tools and habits of mind to look for native and invasive species in local habitats. We are sharing what we find and do not find online. We are contributing to a greater understanding of our shared environment.

Come join our ongoing BioPrinter community project!

Did you know you can print live cells from an inkjet printer? Companies like Organovo are developing ways to 3D print human tissues and organs. But the basic technologies are so accessible that we wanted to play around with them ourselves.

We've built our own functioning bioprinter from a couple of old CD drives, an inkjet cartridge, and an Arduino. We probably won't be printing human organs any time soon, but how about printing a leaf from plant cells? Or add a BlueRay laser to turn it into a miniature laser cutter to print "lab-on-a-chip" microfluidic devices. The possibilities are endless - it all depends where *you* want to take it!

Our community projects are open to anyone, and are driven entirely by whoever wants to show up and participate. This is a great opportunity to come check out BioCurious, and jump into some of the projects going on.

This project has something for everyone, whether it's hardware hacking. programming, Arduinos, microfluidics, synthetic biology, plant biology, cell culturing, tissue engineering - you name it! Everyone has something to learn, or something to teach.

The SeaBC Sea Bird Count is a citizen science project organized by a volunteer group of long-distance birding sailors from around the world. The idea of a “SeaBC” was inspired by popular, long-standing land-based counts such as Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count (CBC) and the Census Bird Count (CBC) in the U.K.

Our mission is to benefit seabird conservation by mobilizing the worldwide boating community to document ocean bird sightings, providing critical and seldom-recorded data on seabird abundance and distribution and on ocean migration routes. SeaBC sea bird count data goes to Cornell University’s eBird database, where boaters’ sightings become a resource for scientists worldwide.

Seabird knowledge is described as a frontier science: Last year a new seabird species was discovered and a species believed to be extinct was sighted. For some species, breeding or wintering areas remain unknown. This lack of knowledge is troubling given that BirdLife International estimates one-third of seabirds are now vulnerable or globally endangered due to threats from predators on nesting grounds, some fisheries, and plastics.

Marine Metre Squared (MM2) is an easy way to survey the intertidal community. Monitor a 1m x 1m square patch of your local rocky shore once every season by recording the animals and plants that live there.

Take fun in special scientific studies and fun educational challenges such as hunting for pest species, looking for evidence of animals breeding, and measuring seaweed growth.

Help others identify their new finds with the online forum. Submit your own questions and encourage others around New Zealand to take part.

The perfect project for families looking for holiday activities, schools and community groups looking for ways to engage with and improve their local environments.

The project website and database will be launched during Seaweek (2 - 10 March 2013).

We are a group of scientists interested in exploring the potential applications of Ecuador’s unique biodiversity. As a first step, we are working to assemble and apply gene libraries collected from around the country.
You can join field trips in Ecuador to collect samples, work in a lab extracting and sequencing nucleic acids, or from home assembling and curating the electronic database.

This is a transcription project that aims to transcribe the Digital Bleek and Lloyd Collection, written in the late 1870's. This collection contains scanned notebooks of |Xam and !Kun languages of the Hunter-Gatherer (Bushman) people of Southern Africa.

Science Pipes is a free service that lets you connect to real biodiversity data, use simple tools to create visualizations and feeds, and embed results on your own website.

SciencePipes allows anyone to access, analyze, and visualize the huge volume of primary biodiversity data currently available online. This site provides access to powerful scientific analyses and workflows through an intuitive, rich web interface based on the visual programming paradigm, similar to Yahoo Pipes. Analyses and visualizations are authored in an open, collaborative environment which allows existing analyses and visualizations to be shared, modified, repurposed, and enhanced.

Behind the scenes, SciencePipes is based on the Kepler scientific workflow software which is used by professional researchers for analysis and modeling. SciencePipes brings that scientific power to new audiences by consolidating the same workflow components used by scientists into pieces that have more intuitive meaning, and by providing components specifically targeted to these audiences.

Because SciencePipes provides tools for original data analyses rather than visualizations of predetermined analyses, it empowers users to develop new and valuable results. Those results can be exposed as dynamic web resources, in web contexts unrelated this site. Finally, because of the generality of the Kepler scientific system upon which this site is built, this online system can be extended to science and engineering disciplines beyond the environmental sciences.

Prepare to get wet and muddy for science! We're looking for citizen scientists in North Carolina to help us learn more about the large, charismatic aquatic insects known as water sticks.

Simply find a body of water in your area, follow the protocol, and submit your data! We'll teach you how to identify the water sticks you find and how to cheaply build any equipment you don't already have (you'll have most of it). And if you don't find anything in the body of water you choose, no problem! Every bit of information helps and anything you can share is useful. With YOUR help, we can discover more about the seasonality, habitat preferences, and distribution of water sticks - together!

The River Watch Program is a voluntary asks pilots to report observed river ice conditions. Pilots are asked for reports on what they see along their normal route of flight and at their standard flight level. The purpose of the program is to assist the National Weather Service in providing accurate forecasts, warnings, and navigation information.

The National Weather Service is responsible for monitoring the ice breakup process to identify the potential for flooding due to ice jams. Alaskan rivers are also heavily used for transportation and knowledge of the status of the breakup process is useful for knowing when it is safe to use boats. Reports from observers can significantly increase the information available for these purposes.

uBiome is the world's first effort to map the human microbiome through citizen science.

What's the microbiome? The microbiome are the bacteria that live on and within us. It sounds kind of funny, but all of us are actually covered in helpful germs. Many conditions – from diabetes to depression, asthma to autism -- have been found to relate to the microbiome.

uBiome brings this cutting edge technology directly to consumers for the first time. The more data we collect, the more we can learn about this important area of research. We've been featured so far in Wired, Venture Beat, the Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, BoingBoing, and more.

Marblar is unique and fun way to engage in citizen science and exchange ideas across disciplines. Marblar posts research projects in need of creative, real-world applications and they ask YOU to come up with those applications.

Singing up is easy and free and there are new projects added regularly. Projects are posted for three weeks. Through online collaboration, the final solutions are posted for users to vote on and further discuss. Top solutions are even awarded cash prizes!

Beginning November 14 through the end of the year, students ages 13-18 around the globe are invited to participate in “Data Detectives”, an engaging web experience to learn about how Big Data will impact their lives and the world they will be inheriting.

Data Detectives is the student component of the Human Face of Big Data, a global crowdsourced project conceived by “Day in Life” series creator Rick Smolan. It aims to help people better visualize the ways big data is shaping our future on this planet, and includes a smartphone app, worldwide events, a large format illustrated book with an interactive iPad app, and a documentary.

The Data Detectives initiative invites students to answer questions, explore fascinating examples of how Big Data is changing their world, interact with real-time data and see how other students around the globe are impacted in similar and different ways.

Nonmarine ostracods, tiny crustaceans with an excellent fossil record, are common in aquatic ecosystems. The Ostracod Metadatabase of Environmental and Geographical Attributes (OMEGA) facilitates access to global geographical and environmental distributional data for nonmarine ostracods, supporting applications in biodiversity auditing, biogeography and the calibration of species as fossil proxies for past environmental and climatic change. Citizen Scientists can help improve accuracy and coverage of datasets by adding, correcting and validating the geographical coordinates of localities.

Utah Water Watch (UWW) is a water quality education and data collection program that seeks to increase awareness about the importance of water quality and promote stewardship of Utah’s aquatic resources.

UWW is a partnership between USU Water Quality Extension and the Utah Division of Water Quality that creates a way for the public to help in monitoring Utah’s lakes and streams. This is a free program for volunteers of all ages to monitor water quality once a month and report the data to water managers.

Help scientists recover Arctic and worldwide weather observations made by United States’ ships since the mid-19th century.

These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and will improve our knowledge of past environmental conditions. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and tell the stories of the people on board.

Hurricane Sandy is currently moving northward along the East coast of the USA (as of 10/29/12), and is expected to collide with a cold front and move inland across the northeastern USA during the next several days. On Friday, WaterIsotopes initiated a call for assistance in collecting samples of precipitation (both rain and snow) associated with the passage of this system.

The goal is to develop an unprecedented spatial and temporal dataset documenting the isotopic composition of rainwater (and snow) associated with this major storm system. These data will tell us about water sources and cycling within the storm system.

We're hoping to see evidence for changes in water sources to the storm as it first collides with the approaching cold front and then leaves the ocean to traverse the NE USA.

The Bodleian Libraries are enlisting the help of the public in order to improve access to their music collections. Over four thousand digitized scores, mostly piano music from the nineteenth century, many of which have illustrated covers, have now been made available online.

By describing these images, you will not only be helping to provide access to this valuable but hitherto 'hidden' collection, you will also be facilitating future research into popular music of the period and the wider social function which it performed during the Victorian age.

The Geo-Wiki Project is a citizen science network that hopes to improve the overall quality of land use and land cover maps across the globe. They host a variety of projects, all of which use their online Google Earth Application to enlist citizen scientists to improve spatial data. By comparing global land use and land cover data to the aerial photography that appears in Google Earth, you can help improve the validity of important data that is being used to solve important global problems.

Geo-Wiki supports a variety of projects that tackle issues that include climate change, the bio-diversity of plants, and the viability of changing agriculture.

They even have developed mobile apps that allow you to ‘ground truth’ data by adding your own photographs of what’s near you.

Video games have the potential to do more than entertain. Citizen Sort is taking advantage of this potential by designing video games that make doing science fun.

Citizen Sort is a research project at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University in New York. Students from Syracuse University drew, colored, programmed and coded two unique citizen science video games. They are Forgotten Island and Happy Match.

Happy Match is a twist on the classic matching game. Players will classify photos of animal, plant and insect species that scientists took live in the field. Each round of the game has a different question and players will drag the animal, plant or insect photo into one of the photo answers along the bottom. Scientists wrote the questions in Happy Match based on information they want to know. By classifying the photos, you'll these help scientists as they study the natural world.

Forgotten Island is a point and click adventure game. Players take on the role of a lost adventurer with a secret past. As the player explores the island they meet a suspicious robot spouting orders to re-classify the falling photographs of plant, animal or insect species. The player will also solve puzzles and explore diverse locations from icy peaks to fiery volcanoes.The more classifications a player does, the more money they earn buy items and solve the mystery of Forgotten Island.

Citizen Sort is partially supported by the US National Science Foundation under grant SOCS 09-68470.

ZooTeach is a website where teachers and educators can share high quality lesson plans and resources that complement the Zooniverse citizen science projects. Citizen science offers a unique opportunity for any person, of any age, of any background to get involved and make a contribution to cutting edge science. Here at Zooniverse headquarters we believe that getting students involved in citizen science offers educators a free, easily accesible and inspiring opportunity to bring real science into the classroom.

Join thousands of people around the world in a conversation about World Wide Views on Biodiversity. What do you think about the way biodiversity is managed? How do you think we should solve the problem of biodiversity loss? Tell us – and see what others are saying!

On Saturday, September 15, people in over 30 countries joined together for a day of deliberations about these issues. There is still time to add your voice – use the materials on the project's site to learn more about the issue of biodiversity, and then chime in with your ideas. Strike up a conversation with your friends to help inform your decision, or leave a comment to start a discussion with others.

Biodiversity is the species, genetic, and ecosystem diversity in an area, sometimes including associated components such as landscape features or climate. Still feel like you need to know more? You can dive deep into the issues with information from some of the National Research Council’s recent and historic work on the topic. Or skip ahead to the booklet, which all participants in the World Wide Views on Biodiversity deliberations received.
Charge:

Vote to add your voice to the conversation.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) needs you to take complex scientific data and images and turn them into informative graphics to convey a simple and easy to understand messages! The JPL’s newest venture is called JPL Infographics, and they need your help to create and post your very own creations of scientific graphic art.

All of the resources are at your fingertips, including high-resolution images, 3-D models, fact sheets, and loads of other data build your very own Infographics. You can browse the numerous of other user creations to get inspired and then upload your creation online!

This is a really fun and challenging project and your work will be used to educate and inform others on the goings on of cutting-edge space exploration. So fire of both sides of your brain and create some educational space art!

The Meteon Network is an ambitious collaboration in Italy to make scientific data from over 400 weather nationwide stations available in an easy to understand visual interface. You can now join in this groundbreaking work and gain access to loads of real time data. You can even add your own data and share analysis among the many members of the network.

The Meteon Network also employs several newer, more human centric, data products including something they call ‘weatherness’, among others, that are normalized to an easy to understand scale. All of these, and several other more traditional weather related measurements, are all displayed in real time on the Network’s interactive mapping application.

This kind of nationwide effort to monitor, analyze, and give citizens a more complete picture of weather may serve as a model for others to follow. Now is your chance to get involved in a trailblazing project and get into weather today!

This DIY mapping tool was the first developed by Public Lab, as part of the Grassroots Mapping project. Citizens use helium-filled balloons and digital cameras to generate high resolution “satellite” maps of areas such as in the Gulf Coast and Gowanus Canal. Although this tool has been in use for two years, components of the kit -- kite and balloon design, the rig, the camera -- continue to evolve as they are adopted in new places and adapted for new purposes. Besides the aerial mapping tools, Public Lab has also developed MapKnitter.org, an online tool for stitching aerial images into maps.

Infrared photography can help in assessing plant health, and has been used on satellites and planes for agricultural and ecological assessment primarily by vineyards, large farms and large-scale (read: expensive) research projects. By creating and open-sourcing a low-cost near-infrared camera and working with wetlands advocates, farmers and environmental activists, the Public Lab community has begun to explore grassroots uses for this powerful analytic technique.

A spectrometer is a ubiquitous tool for scientists to identify unknown materials, like oil spill residue or coal tar in urban waterways. But they cost thousands of dollars and are hard to use -- so the Public Lab community has designed its own.

This open hardware kit costs only $35, but has a range of more than 400-900 nanometers, and a resolution of as high as 3 nm. A spectrometer is essentially a tool to measure the colors absorbed by a material. You can construct this one yourself from a piece of a DVD-R, black paper, a VHS box, and an HD USB webcam.

Public Lab has also created open source software to collect, analyze, compare, and share calibrated spectral data. We've even made an experimental version which converts your cellphone into a spectrometer.

Public Lab community members have used this new tool to identify dyes in "free and clear" laundry detergent, to test grow lamps, and to analyze wines.

Now we need your help in collecting data to build a Wikipedia-style library of open source spectra, and to refine and improve sample collection and analysis techniques. We imagine a kind of "SHAZAM for materials" which can help to investigate chemical spills, diagnose crop diseases, identify contaminants in household products, and even analyze olive oil, coffee, and homebrew beer.

The U.S. Geological Survey is asking volunteers to help map man-made structures and facilities, such as schools and fire stations, in the state of Colorado then, in a few months, the United State. Using an internet mapping application, volunteers can help the USGS update The National Map by correcting or adding information about structures nearby.

"Correctly locating and identifying fire stations, police stations, schools, and hospitals not only makes USGS maps more useful, but can literally save a life," said USGS Director Marcia McNutt.

This smartphone app will help you explore habitats in your area and easily monitor wildlife populations by logging locations, photos, and responding to form questions all with the ease of your smartphone.

Roadkill smartphone app for citizen scientists that will help you monitor wildlife roadkill patterns in your area by logging locations, photos, and responding to form questions all with the ease of your smartphone.

The New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance invites boaters, fishermen, and divers to report their sightings and send in their photos of basking sharks. Your data will help scientists monitor the local population and better understand their migration patterns.

The Shark Observation Network invites Southern California divers to report sightings and submit their photos and videos of Sevengill Sharks, a species whose numbers are seemingly on the rise in the waters off San Diego. Your data will help scientists conduct a long-term study of the population and better understand the Sevengill's migration patterns.

At this very moment in Serengeti National Park, 200 cameras are flashing throughout the night, in corners of the park where tourists never go.

These are camera traps -- remote, automatic cameras that take pictures of passing wildlife - and the Serengeti Lion Project is conducting the largest-ever camera trap survey to better understand the Serengeti ecosystem. The camera traps capture over 1,000,000 images of wildlife each year, capturing the grandeur of the wildebeest migration and rarely seen species from aardvarks to zebras.

Help to transmit these photos by satellite from the Serengeti to the U.S., where they can be analyzed to advance science and conservation. Join this unprecedented initiative to bring cutting edge technology to the wilds of Serengeti, and you'll get first access to witness the Serengeti Live on your computer.

The chloroplasts inside plant cells appear to "clump" together during bacterial infection; this can be devastating for plants and seriously compromise crop yields. We need your help to classify plant cell images by their "clumpiness" in order to further this research.

Helping us to classify the images will give insights into the progression of bacterial infection in plant cells.

We need your help to better understand dragonfly migration in North America. Although it spans three countries and has been documented since the 1880s, North American dragonfly migration is still poorly understood, and much remains to be learned about migratory cues, flight pathways, and the southern limits of overwintering grounds. Become part of an international network of citizen scientists and help monitor the spring and fall movements of the 5 main migratory species in North America, or report on these species throughout the year at a pond or wetland of your choice.

Our volunteers monitor Atlantic coast beaches from Maine to Florida documenting seabird mortality events on any scale, from a single dead gull, to a mass die-off of shearwaters.
The data collected serves as baseline for comparison after oil spills or major disease outbreaks, and as a baseline resource on the impacts of offshore development projects (e.g. oil drilling or wind) on seabird populations.

What should we do about climate change?

Somehow we have to answer this question. You can help. The Climate CoLab seeks to harness the collective intelligence of contributors from all over the world to develop solutions to the problem of global climate change.

In this online global forum, people can create, analyze and select detailed proposals outlining the actions they believe should be taken to address climate change.

How do we connect personal devices for testing and reporting of both air quality and linked physiological data? Such a system would enable not only high-resolution mapping of pollutant concentrations, but also support research and reporting of individual physiological responses related to the pollutant.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) [National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)] envision a future in which powerful, affordable, and portable sensors provide a rich awareness of environmental quality, moment-to-moment physiological changes, and long-term health outcomes. Health care will be connected to the whole environment, improving diagnosis, treatment, and prevention at all levels.

Up to four promising projects will win $15k each for their proposals, and one of them will go on to win $100k for the most effective solution.

Deadline: DEADLINE: 10/05/12

FreeGeek is a nationwide movement that harnesses the power of volunteerism to recycle, rebuilt, and re-sell used computers for the economically underprivileged.

Volunteers receive comprehensive training about how to take apart and rebuild computers as well as how to test and install operating systems.

No formal background in science or computers required, all ages welcome!

Housed within the Department of Geography at the Saint Mary's University campus, this network will serve as a location that members of the community can contact when they have a question about:

How to monitor/measure the environmental quality of the ecosystems in their community (based on Environment Canada's Ecological Monitoring and Assessment (EMAN) Protocols.

How to "access" scientific and social scientific data related to the environment.

How to use this data and utilize technology as a tool to further their understanding of their communities.

World Community Grid's mission is to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity. From your own computer, you can contribute to important scientific research!

World Community Grid uses technology called BOINC that allows you to donate your computer's idle time and energy to collect and pool data for projects like computing for clean water, finding the cure of dengue fever, or fighting childhood cancer.

All results will be in the public domain and made public to the global research community.

The Nearby Nature GigaBlitz is a new kind of BioBlitz-style citizen science project that utilizes panoramic photos of nature to identify and celebrate biodiversity all over the world.

Large, high-quality panoramas can provide a surprising amount of detail and insight into what kinds of biodiversity is just right outside your door.

The project is bi-annual occurring on both the summer and winter solstices. The next GigaBlitz is during this year’s Summer Solstice from June 20th – 26th. The project makes it easy to find diverse organisms near you - from a local park or even your backyard!

Your panaroma can even be chosen to be included in the GigaPan online collection. So charge up your digital cameras and get out there!

GigaPan is headed by biologists and is a partnership between the Fine Fellows Outreach Program and Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab.

Citizens in Space, a project of the United States Rocket Academy, plans to fly citizen-science experiments on fully reusable suborbital spacecraft that are now being developed by US companies.

Citizens in Space has acquired an initial contract for 10 flights with XCOR Aerospace, the Mojave, California-based company that is developing the Lynx spacecraft. It expects to acquire additional flights from XCOR and other companies in the future.

Citizens in Space is currently training three astronaut candidates to fly as operators. It will select and train seven additional astronaut candidates over the next 12 to 24 months. Citizens in Space is also inviting citizen scientists to build 100 experiments to fly on those flights, which are expected to begin in late 2013 or early 2014.

In addition to the general call for experiments, Citizens in Space will offer a cash prize for certain experiments deemed to be of special importance.

Adventurers and Scientist for Conservation is a unique initiative that helps create working reationships between scientists and adventure athletes to perform some truly unique research. Projects have been created all over the world and by groups of all kinds. The project even provides training for adventurers to become adventure-scientists.

The exciting benefits from these projects are numerous. Adventurers benefit by contributing to meaningful conservation research in areas that they visit. Additionally, scientists benefit from attaining inexpensive data that would have been previously hard or impossible to acquire. By no means, however are these adventure research projects limited to avid adventurers and professional scientists. Programs can be created anywhere for any age group. The goal of the project is to train and inspire the next generation of citizen scientists. In short, Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation will help you create a project, recruit participants, and start an Adventure Science project near you!

Leafsnap is an exciting new mobile app that is designed to help citizen scientists identify and locate tree species from photographs and ultimately help the scientific world develop a better understanding of biodiversity. Developed by Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution, Leafsnap contains a unique visual recognition software that helps users identify species from the photographs taken straight from your iphone or ipad.

The app is completely free and will be the first in a series of apps that takes advantage of the newly developed recognition software. The app also contains high-resolution photos of the leaves, flowers, fruit, seeds, and bark of all sorts of species, and is a wonderful visual field guide. Currently, the species of New York City and Washington D.C. are supported, but this list will be expanded in the future.

The app is very user friendly and easy to use. With each photo of a leaf you take, the photo, species information, and geo-location is all automatically sent to the Leafsnap database for scientists to study species distribution.

This Leafsnap website shows the tree species included so far, a visual map of the collectors that have recently contributed, and more information on the project. Contributing to citizen science couldn’t be easier than with this visually engaging app! Get snapping and identify a tree near you!

The Brook Trout Pond Survey Project is an effort to recruit volunteers to identify previously-undocumented wild brook trout populations in remote Maine ponds.

Maine brook trout are a special resource, and we need to know where they are before we can protect and manage them appropriately. The information collected by volunteer anglers will help inform future fisheries management decisions.

The Brook Trout Pond Survey Project is a collaborative effort by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, Maine Council of Trout Unlimited, and Maine Audubon.

The Illinois RiverWatch program engages citizen science volunteers in stewardship, education, and science for Illinois rivers. By becoming a trained volunteer, you can help collect a variety of quality ensured data and help contribute to statewide biological monitoring efforts. There are over 1,500 volunteers already monitoring streams in the state, but there are still more streams waiting to be claimed!

The training process involves attending a workshop that will help train volunteers in data collection and give you all the tools you need to monitor a stream of your choice. Soon, you will be a true citizen scientist and take part in collaborative efforts to keep Illinois’ streams clean and beautiful, sharing your data with other organizations, state agencies, and private interests.

The Solar Hydrogen Activity Research Kit (SHArK) Project gives you the tools to discover a storable form of solar energy.

Solar energy is the only option for producing the renewable carbon-free power needed to power the planet. However, because the sun doesn't shine at night, it is critical that we develop a method to store the energy for night. Producing hydrogen from sunlight and water is an ideal solution to the storage problem.

The SHArK Project uses the process of photoelectrolysis, whereby certain metal oxides are used with solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Currently, no known stable material is capable of efficiently and inexpensively photoelectrolyzing water with visible light. There are, however, millions of untested compounds that might.

This is where students can take the reigns and contribute to real and meaningful science. The SHArK project provides inexpensive kits that include inkjet printers, laser pointers, and LEGOs® to allow students a fun and engaging way to explore chemistry and contribute potential solutions to the world’s energy problem.

Harness the power of the sun with the SHArK Project!

Solitary bees and wasps in your own backyard!!!

Native Buzz is a citizen science project created by the University of Florida (UF) Honey Bee Research and Extension Lab. Our goal is to learn more about the nesting preferences, diversity and distribution of our native solitary bees and wasps, share the information gained and provide a forum for those interested in participating in the science and art of native beekeeping (and wasp-keeping!).

Here at University of Florida Native Buzz you can keep track of your own native buzz nest site and see the results of other participant’s nest sites.

River otters are ideal ambassadors for habitat preservation and restoration since they are charismatic carnivores reliant on healthy watersheds to thrive. The River Otter Ecology Project strives to build understanding and shed light on the conservation status and ecology of the North American river otter and the ecosystems they inhabit in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our work will serve to fill key gaps in the biology and ecology of these elusive but important aquatic carnivores while also directly engaging the public in their conservation through field-research, environmental education and strategic restoration partnerships.

The International Space Apps Challenge is a 2-day, worldwide citizen science event that focuses on developing technologies to solve relevant issues on earth, and in space. The event will take place on all seven continents and will even include collaborators from the international space station. From San Francisco, Nairobi, Melbourne, and even a research station on Antarctica, participants will have the opportunity to collaborate with citizen scientists and professional scientists from a variety of cultures offering a an amazing opportunity for creating unique solutions to a growing list of over 30 global challenges.

The event will take place on April 21st and 22nd of 2012 in a variety of locations across the world. At the event, participants will compete as teams to address challenges ranging from creating a mobile geospatial data visualization application to document environmental degradation activity to creating a mobile application to aid citizens in using social media to report natural disasters. The event aims to unite governments by demonstrating the principles of the Open Government Partnership, an effort endorsed by the U.S. and 52 other countries to promote transparency, participation, and collaboration between governments and citizens. A powerful Citizen Science initiative indeed! Further, the event presents a great opportunity to promote Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education to students through applying technology as solutions to global challenges.

The International Space Apps Challenge is a ‘codeathon’ style event where highly collaborative software development processes result in innovative solutions to unique challenges. Bringing together software developers, engineers, science students, and technologists from around the world is sure to create novel ideas of global scope. The growing list of challenges has been compiled from NASA and several other partnering international agencies; however, you can work with event planners and scientists to submit your own challenge to the event.

This event holds great potential for creating meaningful solutions to global issues and is a truly unique opportunity to collaborate with scientists around the world. Register now to join other citizen scientists and help contribute to global science!

Osprey Watch is a project of the Center for Conservation Biology for birdwatchers across the nation to help identify osprey nests and observe osprey behavior. The project hopes to acquire data across a large enough spatial scale in order to address three pressing issues associated with aquatic ecosystems: climate change, depletion of fish stocks, and environmental contaminants. Ospreys are great indicators of the health of aquatic ecosystems as they are sensitive to small changes in fish populations and water quality.

OspreyWatch has almost 500 Osprey Watchers monitoring almost 800 nests across the nation and in Europe. Ospreys are incredible birds of prey and viewing them in the wild can be an amazing experience. And it may be easier than you think. Many osprey nest in man made objects and might even be right outside your backdoor.

So grab a camera, some binoculars, and locate a nest near you to add photos and descriptions to OspreyWatch’s interactive map. You can even find other nests in your area and help monitor and add updates to nesting activity.

Planet Hunters is a project from Zooniverse where citizen scientists help astronomers identify new planets.

Through data taken from the Kepler Spacecraft, citizens are helping scientists identify stars with possible planets in the Cygnus constellation. The Spacecraft takes brightness data every thirty minutes from over 150,000 stars so there is a lot to look at.

When planets pass in front of stars, the brightness of that star dips, which shows up on the light curves taken from Kepler. These patterns are not always easily recognized by computer algorithms, and in many cases, the human brain is actually more capable of identifying brightness dips.

Help scientist improve maps of Mars and participate in other research tasks to help NASA manage the large amount of data from the Red Planet.

Users create Martian profiles and become "citizens" of the planet. In the map room, citizens can then earn Martian credits by helping place satellite photos on Mars’s surface, counting craters, and even helping the rovers Spirit and Opportunity by tagging photos with descriptions.

The highly interactive website is rich in content and contains other informational videos and mapping applications for citizens to tour Mars and get to know every nook and cranny of its rocky surface.

Become a Martian, explore Mars, have fun!

The Zero Robotics Autonomous Space Capture Challenge asks individuals and teams of programmers from around the world to develop a fuel-optimal control algorithm. The algorithm must enable a satellite to accomplish a feat that’s very difficult to do autonomously: capture a space object that’s tumbling, spinning or moving in the opposite direction.

From March 28 to April 25, 2012, challenge participants will collaborate via the Zero Robotics Website to create a computer algorithm that will be programmed into bowling-ball sized satellites called SPHERES (short for Synchronized Position, Hold, Engage, and Reorient Experimental Satellites) aboard the International Space Station (ISS). An object, simulating a Phoenix payload on-orbit delivery system, will be set in motion inside the ISS under varying conditions, such as tumbling or spinning. The algorithm developed will need to direct the SPHERES satellite to approach the moving object and orient itself to contact with the object via Velcro on the SPHERES satellites.

The winners of each round will be invited to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to view the finals via videolink from the ISS, where the four algorithms will be programmed into SPHERES and tested.

Zero Robotics is co-sponsored by NASA and is run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Space Systems Laboratory to engage U.S. middle and high school students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Temperature Blast is a Maryland Science Center C3 Citizen Science project designed to introduce participants to methods of studying climate. Citizen Scientists collect live and archive Weatherbug data from select stations in the Baltimore region to compare temperatures and log this data for scientists.

Scientists at the Baltimore Ecosystem Study then use this data to test models of temperature patterns across the city to aid in urban planning. This data illustrates the Urban Heat Island effect on the area, a phenomenon classified by temperature differences between a metropolitan area and more rural landscape nearby. An Urban Heat Island is not an effect of climate change, but rather of our activity shaping the environment around us.

Using either this website or our Smartphone application (available free of charge for both iPhone and Android) Citizen Scientists submit temperature data from six weather stations in the Baltimore region. The purpose of this is to collect a stream of simultaneous data from multiple sites in and around the metropolitan area. This data, along with first-hand location observations, will be used to understand the Urban Heat Island Effect in Baltimore.

Anyone with access to the Internet and/or a Smartphone can be a Citizen Scientist and participate in Temperature Blast!? While the data obtained from the program is relevant to the Baltimore metropolitan region, there is no geographic or age restriction for Citizen Scientists.

The Secchi Dip-In is an annual event in which volunteers contribute to our understanding of water quality in the world.

Individuals in volunteer monitoring programs take a transparency measurement on one day during the weeks surrounding Canada Day and July Fourth. You can monitor lakes, reservoirs, estuaries, rivers, or streams, but you must already have the equipment and training. These transparency values are used to assess the transparency of volunteer-monitored lakes in the United States and Canada.

The Dip-In is open to any qualified individual in the world that monitors transparency, temperature, or pH in rivers, streams, estuaries, lakes, or reservoirs. One goal of the Dip-In is to increase the number and interest of volunteers in environmental monitoring.

SETILive is an exciting new project in which volunteers try to detect extraterrestrial signals from space.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) uses images from the Allen Telescope Array and powerful computer algorithms to search for these signals automatically. However, the computer algorithms have a hard time distinguishing between signals that might be extraterrestrial and those that are from earth. This is where you come in!

Researchers need your help to find interesting signals in all that noise. Eventually, they want to learn whatever tricks you use to do your classifications, so they can teach their computer algorithms to do the same thing.

With AlmereGrid you can donate your unused computing time to science. We are located in the Netherlands and support Dutch - and other European universities. Currently we run medical applications from the Erasmus MC - an academic hospital in Rotterdam. We try to communicate in Dutch as much as possible with our volunteers.

Bumble bees are important pollinators, and science needs YOUR help to conserve them. You can contribute to our knowledge of bumble bees and their lives all over the world. Your contribution will tell us about which bumble bees live where, the flowers they visit, and when they're active during the year.

The photo group is administered by Athena Rayne Anderson, a doctoral candidate in Ecology at the University of Georgia, and author of the website.

EyeWire is a citizen science project aimed at mapping the neural connections of the retina. All you have to do is play a relaxing and absorbing game of coloring brain images!

In the game, participants reconstruct the tree-like shapes of the neurons in the retina. By tracing branches throughout images, you can help the computer develop 3-D reconstructions of the neurons.

Anyone can participate – you don’t need any specialized knowledge of neuroscience – and your contributions will help scientists understand how the brain functions. In addition, engineers will also use your input to improve the computational technology that powers the game. This will eventually lead to making software that can detect brain abnormalities that are related to disorders like autism and schizophrenia.

Journey North engages students in a global study of wildlife migration and seasonal change. K-12 students share their own field observations with classmates across North America. They track the coming of spring through the migration patterns of monarch butterflies, robins, hummingbirds, whooping cranes, gray whales, bald eagles— and other birds and mammals; the budding of plants; changing sunlight; and other natural events. Find migration maps, pictures, standards-based lesson plans, activities and information to help students make local observations and fit them into a global context. Widely considered a best-practices model for education, Journey North is the nation's premiere "citizen science" project for children. The general public is welcome to participate.

We need your help to make our project a success! Our Jacobs Technology Inc. Agent-Based and Complex Systems (ABC) groupi in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has won a project with the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA) as part of the Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) program. Our “INterrelated FOrecasts Reflecting Models behind Experts' Decisions” (INFORMED) project seeks ways to aggregate forecasts from multiple knowledgeable subjects to yield a group forecast that is more accurate than any individual. We are developing novel concepts that go well beyond the traditional aggregation or Delphi methods you may be familiar with. The forecasts deal with the kinds of topics about which you probably have some knowledge and interest: politics, economics, the development of science and technology, social events, and public health issues.

This project was recently mentioned as the most exciting technology IARPA is working on! Be part of it!

We need your help and participation to assure the success of this project. So we are asking you to participate and share your knowledge on relevant world and U.S. issues. We need as many people as possible to collect sufficient data to develop and prove our forecasting methodology. Besides that, you will have fun testing your knowledge and observing how well we (you) perform in predicting real world events.

When someone collapses and stops breathing, an automated external defibrillator or AED can save their life. In Philadelphia, PA, a city with about 1.5 million people, AEDs are all around us. Near our homes, workplaces, and even grocery stores! Currently there is no comprehensive map and as a result AEDs are often not used when they are most needed. With the crowdsourced information we collect from our contest, we will build a map of AED locations in Philadelphia which can inform 911 services and the public.

There are three ways to play:

1. Find and photograph the most AEDs in Philadelphia County through Tuesday, March 27, 2012 and win the $10,000 grand prize. The team or individual that finds the most "confirmed," "eligible" AEDs by the contest end date will receive the grand prize of $10,000.

2. Be the first to submit a photograph of a "Golden"AED and win $50. We have identified between 20 and 200 AEDs in Philadelphia County as "Golden" AEDs. These are unmarked and you won't know it's a winner when you photograph it.

3. Want to help but not compete for a prize? Submit addresses of locations without AEDs or that you wish had an AED - this is just for fun and it will help us with our map.

Read the Scistarter interview with the lead researcher here: http://scistarter.com/blog/2012/01/spot-the-most-defibrillators-in-philly-win-10k/

Marine scientists need your help to categorize the complex calls of Killer Whales (Orcas) and Pilot Whales and to understand what the calls mean.

Whales and dolphins make sophisticated sounds that play a critical role in communicating, orienting in the ocean environment, and locating food. Scientists have already begun to categorize Killer Whale calls; however, Pilot Whale calls are much less studied.

Project organizers have assembled recordings of two species from across the world's oceans and seas. Citizen scientists simply listen to individual whale calls and identify potential matching calls. Your contribution will help researchers understand what the whales are saying. You can also help discover whether certain calls are made by an individual, one group, or across broad areas.

The goal of this project is to discover Kuiper Belt Objects with just the right orbit and just the right characteristics to make them eligible for a visit from the New Horizons mission. At this time, the space probe has enough fuel in reserve to allow up to two different objects to be visited.

This is where you come in. To find these icy KBO targets we need your help poring over thousands of ground based images, taken specially for this purpose using giant telescopes. Hiding within these images are undiscovered slow-moving Kuiper Belt Objects, asteroids zipping through the foreground, and millions of background stars.

Help NASA find life on Mars by exploring the bottom of the lakes of British Columbia, Canada.

The Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP) has been investigating the underwater environment with DeepWorker submersible vehicles since 2008. Now with MAPPER, you can work side-by-side with NASA scientists to explore the bottom of these lakes from the perspective of a DeepWorker pilot.

The PLRP team makes use of DeepWorker subs to explore and document freshwater carbonate formations known as microbialites that thrive in Pavilion and Kelly Lake. Many scientists believe that a better understanding of how and where these rare microbialite formations develop will lead to deeper insights into where signs of life may be found on Mars and beyond. To investigate microbialite formation in detail, terabytes of video footage and photos of the lake bottom are recorded by PLRP's DeepWorker sub pilots. This data must be analyzed to determine what types of features can be found in different parts of the lake. Ultimately, detailed maps can be generated to help answer questions like "how does microbialite texture and size vary with depth?" and "why do microbialites grow in certain parts of the lake but not in others?". But before these questions can be answered, all the data must be analyzed.

Reef Watch provides free training to community volunteers to monitor temperate marine environments using non-destructive, internationally recognised techniques.

Volunteers generate valuable scientific data that informs adaptive management for conservation of the marine environment.

Reef Watch engages and empowers the community through education, which raises awareness about the marine environment and fosters a sense of stewardship that is vital to the long-term health of marine environments.

Creek Watch is an iPhone application created by IBM Research that enables you to help monitor the health of your local watershed. Whenever you pass by a waterway, spend a few seconds using the Creek Watch application to snap a picture and report how much water and trash you see. We aggregate the data and share it with water control boards to help them track pollution and manage water resources. You can use the map on the left to explore the data that people have contributed, or see recent contributions as a table.

The Creek Watch App uses four pieces of data:

The amount of water: empty, some, or full.
The rate of flow: still, moving slowly, or moving fast.
The amount of trash: none, some (a few pieces), or a lot (10 or more pieces).
A picture of the waterway.

This data helps watershed groups, agencies and scientists track pollution, manage water resources, and plan environmental programs.

Creek Watch is a project developed at IBM Research - Almaden in consultation with the California State Water Resources Control Board's Clean Water Team.

The iPhone application is now available free on the iTunes store, so you can get started contributing data!

Constellation is a platform for different aerospace related projects that need intensive computational power. The platform supports the efforts of participating projects by providing Distributed Computation capability using BOINC (Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing).

Constellation will send work-units of attached projects to volunteering, idle PCs where the units are processed. The combined power of all volunteering users will help to solve important scientific tasks in fields from astronomy to aerospace-engineering beginning from student up to university projects. The bottom line is to benefit from the generosity of the volunteers and to benefit from the accumulation of different projects, like sharing programming knowledge in distributed computing and influencing the others' simulation by its own solutions.

The platform is an open space for anyone, who is an air and space enthusiast and wants to donate idle computing time or even skill for a sub-project on platform. Applications for sub-project are welcome!

SOHO is the most successful comet discoverer in history, having found over one thousand eight-hundred comets in over thirteen years of operation! What's even more impressive is that the majority of these comets have been found by amateur astronomers and enthusiasts from all over the world, scouring the images for a likely comet candidate from the comfort of their own home.

Absolutely anyone can join this project -- all you need is an internet connection and plenty of free time!

If you are a SCUBA diver, we ask that you send us data logged by your dive computer, so we can put it to scientific use! Millions of divers dive all around the world everyday, with state-of-the-art dive computers that log temperature as a function of depth. As a citizen scientist scuba diver, you can help put this information to the use of oceanographers and marine scientists. Send us your dive site location & an export of your dive computer log; or just write up in an email the information you record in your logbook (like surface temperature, bottom temperature, date, time, location, dive computer brand)!

The goal of this project is to channel temperature & location data from divers to scientists. The data collected will be processed by graduate students and will be made available online on our website for anyone to download.

GreenprintMaps presents the urban forest of the Greenprint region – Sacramento, Yolo, Placer, El Dorado, Sutter, and Yuba Counties. Everyone is invited to join us in mapping all of our trees – in parks, on streets, at schools, in parking lots and at home. You can find trees, add trees, ask a question about a tree, and calculate the value of a tree. GreenprintMaps is fun and easy for everyone. Cities can better manage their trees, planners can protect trees, scientists can combat tree pests and diseases, and homeowners can share their tree stories. We hope you’ll help us grow the best regional urban forest in the nation.

Play your part and help discover our Universe!
Have a computer? Want to help astronomers make awesome discoveries and understand our Universe? Then theSkyNet needs you!
Your computer is bored. It has spare computing power nearly all the time that could be used to do something cool. So why not let it?
By connecting 100s and 1000s of computers together through the Internet, it's possible to simulate a single machine capable of doing some pretty amazing stuff. That's what theSkyNet is all about - using your spare computing power to process radio astronomy data.

SingAboutScience has a searchable database which teachers and others can use to find content-rich songs on specific scientific and mathematical topics. Finding and cataloguing all relevant songs is a challenge, however, and volunteers can be used to help with this. Other possible work might entail technical development of the website and assessment of its usability.

The New York Horseshoe Crab Monitoring Network encourage participants to get involved with the annual horseshoe crab monitoring program on various reference beaches throughout New York’s Marine District. Participants assist with the collection of scientific data that is used to assess the status of horseshoe crabs in NY State, and will help determine the management and conservation of this important species throughout the region.

This data will be used by the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation to assess the status of horseshoe crabs in New York’s Marine District, and to assist with the regional management and conservation of this species through the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

If you participate in this educational survey you will be helping to collect data on horseshoe crab spawning abundance, size, sex and tag returns around full and new moon evenings from May to July.

Cornell University Cooperative Extension’s Marine Program is working with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to develop and organize this project.

Science Hack Day is a 48-hour-all-night event that brings together designers, developers, scientists and other geeks in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building 'cool stuff'. By collaborating on focused tasks during this short period, small groups of hackers are capable of producing remarkable results. Some Hack Days have a specific focus. There have already been very successful Music Hack Days and Government Hack Days. It's time for a Hack Day focused on science!

The Musical Moods experiment for National Science & Engineering Week UK is a sound experiment which aims to find out what you think the mood is of BBC TV theme tunes, past and present. It aims to find out whether there are new ways of classifying online TV content through the mood of the music rather than the programme genre.

Bonaire National Marine Park needs your help to control the invasion of Lionfish. Volunteers in the Netherlands Antilles gently attach a marker on dead coral in the immediate vicinity of the Lionfish.

The Indo Pacific Lionfish Pterois volitans/miles is a predatory, venomous fish which has been introduced as an invasive species in the Atlantic Basin. This invasive carnivore can significantly reduce biodiversity of a local habitat and can drive important fish species to extinction, negatively affecting coral reef ecosystems.

WARNING: This project is potentially dangerous. Most of the fish's spines are venomous and can cause extreme pain!

Wherever you are – anywhere in the world – contribute to science by taking a photo of a blank white piece of paper!

Photos are needed on the following dates:

September 17 and 18, 2011
September 23, 2011
November 6, 2011
December 12, 2011
February 4, 2012
March 20, 2012
May 5, 2012
June 20, 2012
August 6, 2012
September 22, 2012
November 5, 2012

Your photo will used to measure how much of the sun’s energy is reflected back from the Earth -- our planet's "albedo." It's one way scientists can monitor how much energy – and heat – is being absorbed by our planet. By contributing to the Albedo Project, you will be providing data that can be used to examine the similarities and differences of reflectivity around the world.

Should grassy surfaces have the same value in Brazil as in Norway? How does clay soil in the southeastern USA differ from sandy desert in the southwestern USA? Is there any difference in urban “hot spots” that can be attributed to latitude?

Individuals, schools, small and large groups can all use these data to help inform activities that are appropriate and effective for their communities. Whether it is maintaining the health of parks and green spaces, or legislating green building codes, there is something each can do. It is the hope of this project to present some of the actions taken, as well as follow their albedo records over time.

STE - Scuba Tourism for the Environment is aimed at obtaining information on the Red Sea marine biodiversity state, by collaborating with volunteer dive tourists.

In this way the research can provide the institutions with tools to implement conservation and preservation measures, and at the same time it contributes to the development of ecotourism in the area, providing the tourists with a discerning, active and useful way to increase their naturalistic awareness and recreational value of their holidays.

LiMPETS (Long-term Monitoring Program and Experiential Training for Students) is an environmental monitoring and education program for students, educators, and volunteer groups. This hands-on program was developed to monitor the ocean and coastal ecosystems of California’s National Marine Sanctuaries to increase awareness and stewardship of these important areas.

Two distinct monitoring programs make up the core of the LiMPETS network: the Rocky Intertidal Monitoring Program and the Sandy Beach Monitoring Program. Both programs are designed to provide students with the opportunity to experience the scientific process firsthand. Through research-based monitoring and standardized protocols, students develop their problem solving skills, gain experience using tools and methods employed by field scientists, and learn to analyze data. The online data entry system allows our participants to archive their data electronically and to view and analyze their results over time.

The LiMPETS network provides authentic, hands-on coastal monitoring experiences that empower teachers, students and the community to conduct real science and serve as ocean stewards.

Invasive self-cloning crayfish are on their way to a stream or lake near you!

We need your help to monitor our waterways for the invasion of new species of crayfish. High on our priority list is Marmokrebs, a species that reproduces asexually – making it an extremely successful intruder in pristine ecosystems. Let’s make sure we know exactly where this and many other potentially invasive species are headed!

Take pictures of crayfish and tell us where and when you found it. The goal of this project is to help monitor waters for introduction of new and potentially invasive species of crayfish.

Invasive crayfish have had devastating effects in many freshwater ecosystems across the world, often driving local fish and invertebrate species to extinction. With your help, we can make sure to prevent this from happening here! Thanks in advance for helping us in this important project!

Help identify and catalog the trees in Philadelphia's urban forest! PhillyTreeMap is an open-source, web-based map database of trees in the greater 13-county 3-state Philadelphia region. The wiki-style database enables non-profits, government, volunteer organizations, and the general public to collaboratively create an accurate and informative inventory of the trees in their communities. The project was funded by a USDA Small Business Innovation Research Grant and is in support of the Philadelphia Parks & Recreation's 30% tree canopy goal and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's "Plant One Million" campaign. As more trees are added to the database, PhillyTreeMap uses the iTree software from the USDA Forest Service to calculate the environmental impact of the region's urban forest. So get outside and add some trees!

EcoSpark's Changing Currents program introduces grade 8-12 students from across the Greater Toronto Area (Toronto, Peel, Durham, and York school boards) to their area's watersheds. Students get outside, put on hip waders, explore a local river stream, and learn about its importance and quality.

By participating in the program students will:

use benthic macro-invertebrate bio-monitoring to examine the health of their local river or stream (it's easy!),
contribute to a GTA-wide study of watersheds, and
have the chance to take action around what they discover

The Skidaway Institute of Oceanography has been funded by the Georgia Coastal Zone Management Program to assess the distribution of wrack in the salt marshes of coastal Georgia. Marsh wrack is the dead marsh grass that forms large layers on top of the water or the marsh surface.

The project will map the distribution for a number of different years from aerial photographs to determine how much wrack is present in coastal Georgia and where wrack is found in different seasons. The project also aims to study how long wrack persists in a variety of marsh settings.

To do this, the project needs citizen scientists to help document marsh wrack sites. Volunteers will do the following activities:

1. Identify site or sites that you can document at least weekly by taking photos.
2. Gather latitude/longitude location data for each site.

Anyone who helps out will get a copy on the final results of the study and acknowledgement of their help in the text

The ECOCEAN Whale Shark Photo-identification Library is a visual database of whale shark (Rhincodon typus) encounters and of individually catalogued whale sharks. The library is maintained and used by marine biologists to collect and analyse whale shark encounter data to learn more about these amazing creatures.

The Library uses photographs of the skin patterning behind the gills of each shark and any scars to distinguish between individual animals. Cutting-edge software supports rapid identification using pattern recognition and photo management tools.

You too can assist with whale shark research by submitting photos and sighting information. The information you submit will be used in mark-recapture studies to help with the global conservation of this threatened species.

Volunteers are needed weekly to collect water samples and other physical climate measurements, then identify species of phytoplankton under a light microscope while watching for potentially harmful algal blooms (HABs) and signs of environmental disturbance in our marine waters.

The Seeker, Collaborative Chronic Care Network (C3N), is looking for approaches to using games and/or game dynamics applications to inspire adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease and other chronic illnesses to create and maintain their own health.

TuAnalyze is an application for recording and sharing measures of your diabetes. The application allows those touched by diabetes to track, share and compare their health information. Contributions will help advance diabetes care and public health response.

TuAnalyze is available to any TuDiabetes community member. The application supports sharing of diabetes information throughout the community and feedback of community-level diabetes information to users.

You can learn more about your diabetes by viewing information on your TuAnalyze app in the My Apps section of your profile. You can compare personal measures of your diabetes to community measures on the TuAnalyze map.

The TuAnalyze app is jointly developed by Children's Hospital Boston and TuDiabetes.

Redwood Watch needs volunteers to take photographs of redwood trees and submit them to researchers. Your data will help researchers understand where redwoods survive and help track redwood forest migration over time.

If you spot a redwood in a park, your own backyard, or in a botanical garden, snap a picture and submit it online. You can use a digital camera, or the Redwood Watch iPhone application, powered by iNaturalist.

Scientists don't yet know how climate change will impact the redwood forest. By understand where redwoods grow well today, scientists can better predict where the redwood forests of will thrive in the future. Join Redwood Watch and help redwoods survive!

The project is a partnership between the Save the Redwoods League, iNaturalist, Google Earth Outreach, and the California Academy of Sciences.

NoiseTube needs citizen scientists to monitor noise pollution. Participants install a free mobile application on their cell phone and measure the level of noise in their area.

Noise pollution is a serious problem in many cities. (Noise can change the balance in predator /prey detection and navigation among migratory species, among other detrimental effects.) This is your chance to turn your mobile phone into an environmental sensor and make an important contribution to science.

Your data will be shared with the NoiseTube community through a collective map of noise pollution. Local governments, city planners, researchers, and others will be able to access and analyze the data.

The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, working with many partner organizations, has established Mitten Crab Watch as a public reporting and information network to track the distribution, abundance, and status of this invasive species for the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Get a snapshot of the health of the Boise River watershed by monitoring water quality! Citizen groups, schools, families, and individuals are invited to participate in this fun event which takes place at numerous sites along the Boise River and tributaries from Lucky Peak to Star. No experience necessary! A knowledgeable trainer will meet you at your assigned location to assist with monitoring.

Download and play the ACTUV Tactics Simulator and submit your results to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Your results will help develop the future of anti-submarine warfare.

Think you can best an enemy submarine commander so he can’t escape into the ocean depths?

If you think you can, you are invited to put yourself into the virtual driver’s seat of one of several Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) configurations and show the world how you can use its capabilities to follow an enemy submarine.

DARPA’s ACTUV program is developing a fundamentally new tool for the Navy’s ASW toolkit and seeks your help to explore how best to use this tool to track quiet submarines. Before autonomous software is developed for ACTUV’s computers, DARPA needs to determine what approaches and methods are most effective. To gather information from a broad spectrum of users, ACTUV has been integrated into the Dangerous WatersTM game. DARPA is offering this new ACTUV Tactics Simulator for free public download.

This software has been written to simulate actual evasion techniques used by submarines, challenging each player to track them successfully. Your tracking vessel is not the only ship at sea, so you’ll need to safely navigate among commercial shipping traffic as you attempt to track the submarine, whose driver has some tricks up his sleeve.

Give it a try!

Digitalkoot needs volunteers to fix mistakes in the index of old Finnish newspapers. And you do this by playing games! Your participation will greatly increase the accuracy of text-based searches of the newspaper archives.

Most of the information in the National Library of Finland's newspaper archives has already been copied into computer databases using computerized text recognition. The problem is that computers fail to recognize all the words. Especially when the quality of the source material is poor, the results need to be fixed by hand. This requires a lot of manual work.

The goal of the project is to index the National Library of Finland's enormous archives so that they are searchable on the Internet. This will enable everyone to easily access Finland's cultural heritage.

Digitalkoot is run by the National Library of Finland and Microtask.

The OPAL Water Survey needs citizen scientists in England to record what life they see in local ponds and to conduct simple tests for water clarity and pH. By contributing, you'll help scientists learn more about how polluted lakes and ponds in England actually are.

Animals living in the water can tell us a great deal about how polluted the water may be. Some species struggle to survive in polluted waters, while others are more tolerant. By telling us what life you see in your local pond you’ll discover more about the water's health and contribute to valuable scientific research.

This is one of five OPAL surveys across England to learn more about the state of the environment. Anyone can get involved. The studies are open to all ages and abilities, and your contribution will be important in helping scientists build up a picture of England's natural environment.

The Encyclopedia of Life is an online, collaborative project where you can learn about any species on Earth, as well as contribute information and submit photos. This global initiative seeks to create an "infinitely expandable" resource for all of our planet’s 1.9 million known species.

The Encyclopedia of Life draws from existing databases, such as AmphibiaWeb and Mushroom Observer, and sponsorship from a number of leading scientific organizations. The scientific community and general public can contribute to this growing body of knowledge by posting images to the Flikr group and adding tags and text comments to any species page. In addition, citizen naturalists with a demonstrated commitment to quality science can apply to become curators who are responsible for maintaining the project's vetted content.

Phylo is a game in which participants align sequences of DNA by shifting and moving puzzle pieces. Your score depends on how you arrange these pieces. You will be competing against a computer and other players in the community.

Though it may appear to be just a game, Phylo is actually a framework for harnessing the computing power of mankind to solve a common problem -- Multiple Sequence Alignments.

A sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA or protein to identify regions of similarity. These similarities may be consequences of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. From such an alignment, biologists may infer shared evolutionary origins, identify functionally important sites, and illustrate mutation events. More importantly, biologists can trace the source of certain genetic diseases.

Traditionally, multiple sequence alignment algorithms use computationally complex heuristics to align the sequences. Unfortunately, the use of heuristics do not guarantee global optimization as it would be prohibitively computationally expensive to achieve an optimal alignment. This is due in part to the sheer size of the genome, which consists of roughly three billion base pairs, and the increasing computational complexity resulting from each additional sequence in an alignment.

Humans have evolved to recognize patterns and solve visual problems efficiently. By abstracting multiple sequence alignment to manipulating patterns consisting of coloured shapes, we have adapted the problem to benefit from human capabilities. By taking data which has already been aligned by a heuristic algorithm, we allow the user to optimize where the algorithm may have failed.

All alignments were generously made available through UCSC Genome Browser. In fact, all alignments contain sections of human DNA which have been speculated to be linked to various genetic disorders, such as breast cancer. Every alignment is received, analyzed, and stored in a database, where it will eventually be re-introduced back into the global alignment as an optimization.

Let's play!

This proposed nutrient survey of the Mississippi River watershed seeks to glean a better understanding of the distribution of inorganic nutrient sources into the Mississippi River.

By conducting this study, we seek to identify 'hot spots' within which to target follow-up research and engineering efforts aimed at decreasing the load of nutrients introduced into this river - and in so doing, successfully mitigate their consequent effect upon the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.

The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources coastal shark survey monitors the populations of our resident shark species. We need volunteers to come out on the boat with us to help catch, measure, tag, and release sharks. Participants must be 18 or older, must not get seasick, and must be ok being out on the water all day in a boat that has no shade or bathroom. We leave from Charleston, SC.

PowerSleuth meets PowerMeter invites teachers and students in Maine to examine electricity data and help homeowners monitor how much electricity they’re using while they’re using it.

You’ll engage in a series of investigations and activities using these new tools and other resources to answer questions about home electricity use. Along the way you’ll learn more about electricity - how it’s measured, how customers are charged for their use and how much electricity common household appliances use. As you engage in this work, be sure to keep a good science notebook; record your ideas, what you’re finding out, and the new questions you have. You’ll use your findings to make recommendations for conserving electricity.

Electricity is one of the few things we use first and pay for later. Throughout the month people use electricity in their homes for many different things. At the end of the month, the homeowner receives a bill for the total amount of electricity used during the previous month. The appliances in our homes aren’t marked with price tags so we don’t know as we turn them on them how much electricity they use. Another thing that makes it difficult to keep track of how much electricity our homes are using is we can’t see electricity!

Join the PowerSleuth Meets PowerMeter project and learn a few simple things you and your family can do to save energy.

Let's get started!

The Master Watershed Steward program trains citizens across the state of Arizona to serve as volunteers in the protection, restoration, monitoring, and conservation of their water and watersheds.

We all live in a watershed, also known as a drainage basin or catchment. Each watershed is defined by an area of land that drains water downhill into a common water body. The health of watersheds is especially impacted as our growing population, and thus our demand for natural resources, increases. Learning to look past political boundaries and view land as divided by natural boundaries helps us better manage resources as a complete, more sustainable system.

As a Master Watershed Steward you can help to improve the health of your watershed. The project's informative, research-based training will give you the knowledge to make better, more informed decisions related to your own land, community and watershed. Master Watershed Stewards are highly trained volunteers working closely with the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Stewards may come from a variety of backgrounds, but all have a passion for our environment! To become certified, Master Watershed Stewards participate in over 40 hours of course and field work to learn the basics of watershed science.

You work with community organizations including watershed partnerships and various state agencies to implement projects throughout Arizona to monitor, maintain and restore the health of our watersheds. Ongoing volunteer projects include: photopoint monitoring in the Tonto National Forest and Saguaro National Park, riparian assessments along urban and preserved corridors, outreach at Arizona Project WET Water Festivals, free private well testing and collaboration with NEMO to develop Watershed Based Plans.

The Master Watershed Steward Program is a partnership of the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Funding provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Water Act and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality's Water Quality Division.

Join RainLog's network of over 1,000 volunteers that use backyard rain gauges to monitor precipitation across Arizona and in neighboring states. Data collected through this network will be used for a variety of applications, from watershed management activities to drought planning at local, county, and state levels.

All you need to participate is a rain gauge and access to the Internet. Volunteers select a rain gauge, install it at home, and report daily total rainfall amounts through the online data entry form. Volunteers are asked to track daily or monthly precipitation amounts.

Precipitation amounts are highly variable across Arizona due to topography and seasonal weather patterns. This is especially true during the monsoon season, when thunderstorms can produce heavy rainfall that is very localized.

Your observations will provide valuable information to be used in drought monitoring and resource management decision-making.

All data posted by volunteers is available in real-time in maps. These maps are useful in tracking high-resolution variability in precipitation patterns and potential changes in drought status. As more people participate and more information is gathered, the resolution of the maps will improve.

With your help, OpenSignalMaps is creating a comprehensive database of cell phone towers, cell phone signal strength readings, and Wi-Fi access points around the world. This data is collected via an Android application and uploaded to the project's servers, taking care to use as little processing power and battery life as possible.

You can use the project website to browse the data they've collected, including heat maps that show exactly how strong signal is in any particular area, as well as all the nearby towers for your carrier. And don't worry -- the data is stripped of any identifying information and available on a graphical interface to enable you to make sense of the raw data.

Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

iNaturalist is a place where you can record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers, and learn about the natural world.

From hikers to hunters, birders to beach-combers, the world is filled with naturalists, and many of us record what we find. What if all those observations could be shared online? You might discover someone who finds beautiful wildflowers at your favorite birding spot, or learn about the birds you see on the way to work. If enough people recorded their observations, it would be like a living record of life on Earth that scientists and land managers could use to monitor changes in biodiversity, and anyone could use to learn about nature.

That's the vision behind iNaturalist. So if you like recording your findings from the outdoors, or if you just like learning about life, join the project!

Eye on Earth brings together scientific information on air and water quality with feedback and observations from millions of ordinary people. You'll be able to view air and bathing water quality for the majority of Europe as well as provide your own feedback.

Eye on Earth represents a partnership between Microsoft and the European Environmental Agency. It includes information on the water quality for more than 22,000 bathing sites throughout Europe. It also includes information on air quality for more than 1,000 air quality monitoring stations throughout Europe.

Over five years, the site will grow to include information on many other environmental topics and turn into a global observatory for environmental change. It will broaden the thematic spectrum of environmental information by integrating prominent environmental challenges of our times, such as ground level ozone and other forms of air pollution, oil sills, biodiversity, and coastal erosion.

Join the fun!

WildObs (from "wildlife observations") participants capture memorable wildlife encounters and put them to work. Record your encounters for your own studies, or enjoyment. Use these records to develop you own wildlife calendar for the year. Maintain and grow your life-list, learn about new species and connect with nature.

Join the WildObs community via your Android or iPhone and use technology to help you connect with nature.

As a wildlife community, WilObs participants help each other find the nature (for a photograph or close encounter) and we learn about the species in our neighborhoods. WildObs is Collaborative wildlife enjoyment. It can help connect each other to wildlife.

Additionally, WildObs is a proud partner of the National Wildlife Federation's Wildlife Watch, and works with a number of other scientific studies to extract citizen science from recorded encounters.

Participants will engage in community-based water quality reporting, data sharing, and analysis. Get involved in water quality issues in Toronto, Canada.

"Juturna" is a web-based geographic information system that supports the collection, analysis, data sharing and reporting of community collected water quality data. It is currently implemented to support EcoSpark's "Changing Currents" program that links water quality monitoring to environmental and science curriculum in schools. This project addresses requirements of data sharing and monitoring specified in Annex 4 of the Canada-Ontario Agreement. It provides a collaborative mechanism among researchers at York University, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and the civil society organization EcoSpark (formerly Citizens Environment Watch) to monitor environmental conditions of local watersheds.

Stream Monitoring is a statewide program for Wisconsin citizens interested in learning about and improving the quality of the state's streams and rivers. As a volunteer for monitoring through Beaver Creek Reserve Citizen Science Center, you will collect information once a month May through September from one of the numerous streams in the Lower Chippewa Basin.

This project is designed to monitor and prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species in West-central Wisconsin through heightened awareness and education. Volunteers participate in a variety of ways, including collecting samples of aquatic invasive species, talking to boaters at area boat landings, and conducting water quality monitoring.

Watershed Watch increases the understanding of New Mexico's water quality, river ecology and fisheries health through hands-on science in a real-world context. Students gather data on biological, chemical and physical indicators and make presentations to local data users including acequias (irrigation canals), school boards, federal agencies and watershed groups. Students become engaged in environmental studies of issues beyond the classroom to that address critical water issues in local regions.

The Common Loon Citizen Science Project needs volunteers to conduct surveys at 45 high priority lakes in Glacier National Park to document presence of common loons and observations of breeding and nesting behaviors.

Common Loons are a Montana Species of Special Concern, and Glacier National Park harbors about 20 percent of Montana’s breeding pairs. Since 1988, data has been collected once every year during Loon Days. Analysis of these data indicate lower reproductive rates for pairs in the park compared to the rest of Montana. Finally, there is evidence that loons are adversely impacted by human disturbance at nest and nursery sites.

The Common Loon Citizen Science Project educates park staff and volunteers on successful identification and observation techniques when surveying for loons in hopes of increasing our understanding of this species. By improving accuracy of sightings and surveys and increasing coverage of lakes with loons throughout the nesting season, the project aims to gather season-long information to gain a better estimate of the health of Glacier National Park's loon population. The project will also use the data to begin to identify factors affecting nesting success.

Since 2005 the Glacier National Park Citizen Science program has enlisted trained park visitors, staff and volunteers to collect scientific information that would otherwise be unavailable to resource managers and researchers due to lack of personnel or funding. For citizen scientists, the rewards are a sense of stewardship and a greater awareness and understanding of the park’s resource issues. For the park, it provides a wealth of data which can be used to increase understanding of our natural resources, offering an opportunity to get much-needed baseline information about key plant and animal species.

The International Sea Turtle Observation Registry is a database of sea turtle sightings to help sea turtle biologists and conservations track and understand the distribution of sea turtles around the world. You can help!

When you see a live turtle, please report it to the registry. Data will be made available to scientists and managers to improve the understanding of our marine environment.

The North Carolina Sea Turtle Project trains volunteers to monitor sea turtle activity along the entire coast of North Carolina.

There are a number of ways that your citizen science efforts can help protect sea turtles in North Carolina. Volunteers are needed to:

- walk small sections of beach each morning from May to August to look for turtle tracks and nests
- help guard the nests as they become ready to hatch each evening from July to October
- respond to strandings
- transport injured turtles to rehabilitation centers

All the data collected by the project are organized and disseminated to the state and federal agencies that use the information to make management decisions.

The North Carolina Sea Turtle Project, run by the state Wildlife Resources Commission's Division of Wildlife Management, is committed to monitoring North Carolina's sea turtle population. The project would not be possible without the help of hundreds of volunteers!

SKYWARN is a national network of volunteer severe weather spotters. The spotters are trained by local National Weather Service Forecast Offices on how to spot severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail, and flooding. In some parts of the country, spotters also report snowfall and ice accumulation.

During hazardous weather, such as severe thunderstorms, floods, tornadoes, snow and ice storms, SKYWARN volunteers report what is happening at their location. They are asked to report whenever certain criteria are met such as when one inch of rain has fallen, four inches of snow is on the ground, a thunderstorm is producing hail, or trees have been blown down.

Reports arrive at the forecaster's office via the telephone, fax, Internet, and amateur radio. The reports are combined with radar and satellite data to determine what the storms will do next. Spotters provide the "ground-truth" to forecasters. Radar may tell us that heavy snow is falling, but it can not tell us how much snow is on the ground or if rain is mixing with the snow. Spotters do. The reports are used by forecasters to send out public statements, warnings and advisories, and short-term forecasts.

Two-thirds of SKYWARN volunteers are licensed amateur radio operators. Amateur radio plays a big role in the SKYWARN program. During severe weather, amateur radio volunteers man a radio station at our office. They talk to our spotters in the particular area that a storm is hitting and request information needed by the forecasters such as hail size or rainfall accumulation. Large storms such as hurricanes can knock out phone service. SKYWARN amateur radio volunteers help us when there are communications outages so that we can continue to receive weather reports and feed warnings and other critical information out to communities.

SKYWARN volunteers are people who either have a strong interest in weather or are public service oriented. This includes amateur radio operators, REACT members, or emergency response personnel. Our spotters are all ages beginning as young as 14 and range well into retirement age. We have farmers, pilots, engineers, housewives, lawyers, television cameramen, teachers, students, firemen, and more. Our volunteers are truly diverse but with a common interest in weather and a strong desire to help their community.

The WildLab engages citizen scientists in bird and other wildlife identification, using mobile phones as tools of scientific discovery. Along with associated curricula and educational activities found on its website, the WildLab is a powerful new way to see the environment.

The WildLab Bird iPhone app includes photographs, audio, and range maps for more than 200 common bird species. The app helps users make correct identifications by leading them through a process of elimination. The application saves each sighting with location and other data, and sightings are logged in the user’s online WildLab account. Files based on a user's sightings can be easily loaded into Cornell Lab of Ornithology's eBird database.

In a pilot program developed with funding from the MacArthur Foundation, more than 500 New York City 5th- through 12th-grade students used iPhones to log thousands of bird sightings from nearby parks and green spaces. Participants in the project increased their knowledge as well as their interest in science careers. All educators involved in the project said they would participate again if it was offered in the future.

The WildLab has also piloted a program with the Cornell Cooperative Extension for horseshoe crab monitoring; this app will be available soon in the app store. Through collaborations with science education institutions around the country, the WildLab continues to develop new apps and will run its in-school bird program this fall.

Participants throughout Wisconsin are asked to collect freshwater mussel shells or to take photos of live mussels from rivers, lakes, or streams. Over half of Wisconsin's 51 native mussel species (also known as clams) are listed as species in greatest need of conservation, or we need information on where they currently occur. Threats like habitat alteration (dams, silt) and the presence of invasive mussels (zebra mussels) pose major threats to the existence of our native mussels. The Mussel Monitoring Program of Wisconsin would like your help in finding out what mussels occur in your area!

CitSci.org is a platform that supports a variety of citizen science programs using a centralized database to store and deliver science data, with a focus on community based monitoring programs. This platform allows program coordinators to create their own projects and datasheets, manage members, define measurements, create analyses, and even write feedback forms.

World Birds is a volunteer network that collects and makes available bird observations from around the world.

Developed as a global "family" of databases, each country has its own system linked to the map portal. This portal allows you to choose a country and submit your bird observations, thus making a valuable contribution to bird conservation on a local, national, and international scale.

Broadly accessible and with a strong community structure, this global initiative will establish a vast source of bird and environmental information generated by general birdwatchers and professionals alike.

Over time, more countries will be brought online as BirdLife partners implement new systems, leading to better coverage. Some of these databases will be developed independently, but many will be based on a core system, developed with the intention of bringing online as many countries as possible quickly and with minimal expense.

Seabird Ecological Assessment Network (SEANET) volunteers conduct beached bird surveys along the east coast of the United States in order to identify and record information about bird mortality. Volunteers examine the spatial pattern of bird carcass deposition and how it varies across time.

The project brings together interdisciplinary researchers and citizen scientists in a long-term collaborative effort to identify and mitigate threats to marine birds.

These surveys provide baseline information about bird mortality and help to detect mass mortality events such as oil spills, algal toxins, and disease outbreaks. Marine birds can serve as indicators of ecosystem and human health; monitoring the threats they face and their mortality patterns can teach us about the health of the marine environment.

This project relies heavily on a working partnership between concerned citizens with an incomparable understanding of local ecosystems and natural phenomena, and scientists with the training and knowledge to synthesize and verify the data generated by local residents. Through this synergistic relationship, scientists exponentially increase the amount and range of data they can access, and residents come to see the larger patterns and trends of which their local ecosystem is a part.

The Colorado River Watch Network supports volunteers who monitor the water quality at strategically located sites across the Colorado River watershed from West Texas to the coast. The network serves as an early warning system that alerts the Lower Colorado River Authority to potential water quality threats.

The network's mission is to encourage and support community-based environmental stewardship by providing citizens, teachers, and students with the information, resources, and training necessary to monitor and protect the waterways of the lower Colorado River watershed.

Volunteer monitors submit data for approximately 120 sites each year, with an average annual total of roughly 1,000 monitoring events reported.

SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a scientific effort seeking to determine if there is intelligent life outside Earth. SETI researchers use many methods. One popular method, radio SETI, listens for artificial radio signals coming from other stars. SETI@home is a radio SETI project that lets anyone with a computer and an Internet connection participate.

Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power.

Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea. SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999.

The SETI@home project hopes to convince you to allow us to borrow your computer when you aren't using it and to help us "…search out new life and new civilizations." We'll do this with a screen saver that can go get a chunk of data from us over the internet, analyze that data, and then report the results back to us. When you need your computer back, our screen saver instantly gets out of the way and only continues it's analysis when you are finished with your work.

The Acoustics Research Centre at the University of Salford is building a sound map of the world as part of a new study into how sounds in our everyday environment make us feel. We need your help!

We’re asking people across the world to use our new iOS app on their iPhones or iPads (or any recorder) to record short clips from different sound environments, or "soundscapes"--anything from the inside of a family car to a busy shopping centre. Then we ask volunteers to comment on their soundscapes and upload them to our virtual soundscape map.

Recordings and responses will be analyaed by acoustic scientists, and significant findings will be reported on this website.

Sound Around You aims to raise awareness of how our soundscape influences us, and could have far reaching implications for professions and social groups ranging from urban planners to house buyers.

This is a local, month-long extension of World Water Monitoring Day, during which volunteers in New Jersey's Morris and Somerset Counties will collect basic water quality data from the streams and lakes in the Great Swamp Watershed. The project runs from September 18, the official date of the international water monitoring day, through October 18. The organizers plan to repeat it in the same time frame every year.

World Water Monitoring Day (WWMD) is a worldwide education and outreach program that builds public awareness and involvement in protecting water resources by engaging citizens to conduct basic monitoring of their local water bodies.

Florida LAKEWATCH is a volunteer water-monitoring program that facilitates "hands-on" participation in the management of lakes, rivers, and coastal sites through monthly sampling activities. Participants work with researchers at the University of Florida to collect samples that, when analyzed, will contribute to the understanding of Florida’s water bodies.

All volunteers attend a two-hour training session on how to collect water samples and monitor lakes. As a trained LAKEWATCH volunteer, you will help develop a database of water chemistry for your particular lake, river, or coastal site. These data can then be used to establish trends and develop an overview of how your site fits into the overall picture of Florida water bodies.

Volunteers receive a free newsletter subscription and invitations to free Florida LAKEWATCH volunteer appreciation meetings. Don't miss out!

Noah is a mobile phone app that allows nature lovers to document local wildlife and add their observations to a growing database for use by ongoing citizen-science projects.

Using the Noah mobile application, users take a photograph of an interesting organism, select the appropriate category, add descriptive tags, and click submit. The application captures the location details along with the submitted information and stores all of it in the species database for use by efforts such as Project Squirrel and the Lost Ladybug Project.

In addition, users can see what kinds of organisms are nearby by searching through a list or exploring a map of the most recent spottings in their area, all on a mobile phone.

Noah is all about discovering and documenting local wildlife. We work with research groups and organizations to help gather important data and we want you to help by logging recent spottings on your mobile phone. Missions can range from photographing specific frogs or flowers to tracking migrating birds or invasive species or logging the effects of the oil spill.

Explore, share, and contribute photos of animals around the world. Animals and Earth is a resource for photos of all species, their behavior, habitats, and conservation efforts.

There are several ways you can participate.

Option A: Find photos or issues you care about by browsing our photo collection of animals and earth photos. Gather a photo collection, create a blog, and start your own conservation effort using our content

Option B: Grab your camera and help document the flora and fauna of your place on earth.

Option C: Help identify animals and places on our site by adding photo locations and Latin names for animals photos that are not identified yet. Post photos to websites, blogs and social networks promotes awareness and conservation.

Imagine an expedition with a field staff of 10,000. How about 100,000? It's possible. Supported by National Geographic Digital Media, "Field Expedition: Mongolia — Valley of the Khans Project" is an innovative, noninvasive archaeological survey of Mongolia’s sacred lands that allows web users around the world to actively participate in an ongoing, real-time scientific exploration. Valley of the Khans is the ultimate citizen science project.

Because of the extensive size of the region of Mongolia being explored, detailed analysis of the terrain is beyond the capability that any single individual can handle. By providing real-time data, satellite imagery, maps and other information from the field directly to web users at home, the Valley of the Khans Project harnesses the analytic power of the collective public to crowdsource the identification of on-the-ground anomalies — anomalies that could indicate sites of cultural heritage. Once candidate locations are pinpointed they will be ground-truthed in real time by the expedition team concurrently working in the field.

Field Expedition: Mongolia also serves a greater technology purpose as well. In addition to guiding potential discoveries and supplementing the limitations of computer-based computational search alone, the data generated by sourcing a massive human demographic could be used to develop human computation concepts that will train computer-vision algorithms and facilitate active machine learning. This is especially relevant in the case of visual analytics where human intuition remains beyond the scope of existing computer object recognition algorithms.

Wisconsin NatureMapping is the place for citizens, students, and professionals to map their observations of Wisconsin wildlife.

As you know, wildlife knows no property boundaries. A robin will flit from tree to tree with no regard to whether that tree is in a state park or in your backyard. But what if that robin builds a nest in the tree outside your window? Who monitors that nest? What about the deer that come into your yard and eat your vegetables? Who is monitoring them?

The answer is: YOU are! You know your backyard and your neighborhood better than most natural resource professionals do simply because YOU live there and YOU see the critters that live there every day!

To best manage wildlife populations, Wisconsin state biologists need to have as much information as possible about where a species lives. That means they need to know just as much about where species are when they are NOT on public land as when they are. And YOU are the critical link to making sure they get that information.

Another very important reason you should NatureMap is because the wildlife observations you submit to Wisconsin NatureMapping are used to better inform the Wisconsin State Wildlife Action Plan. This is a federally mandated plan in which the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources must describe how they will manage all of the species of Wisconsin wildlife. Map your wildlife observations today!

ClimatePrediction is a distributed computing project that aims to produce predictions of the Earth's climate up to the year 2300 and to test the accuracy of climate models. To do this, the project needs people around the world to volunteer time on their computers - time when their computers are on but not being used at full capacity.

The project needs you to run a climate model program on your computer. The model will run automatically in the background whenever you switch your computer on, and it should not affect any other tasks for which you use your computer. As the model runs, you can watch the weather patterns evolve on your unique version of the world. The results are sent back to project coordinators via the Internet, and you will be able to see a summary of your results on the website. ClimatePrediction uses the same underlying software, BOINC, as many other distributed computing projects and, if you like, you can participate in more than one project at a time.

Climate change, and our response to it, are issues of global importance, affecting food production, water resources, ecosystems, energy demand, insurance costs, and much else. Current research suggests that the Earth will probably warm over the coming century; Climateprediction should, for the first time, tell us what is most likely to happen.

Collect Gulf Oil Spill data using your iPhone. MoGO (Mobile Gulf Observatory) is an app that turns you and your iPhone into a "citizen scientist" helping wildlife experts find and rescue oiled birds, sea turtles, and dolphins.

The MoGO app allows you to take and submit photos of oiled, injured, and dead marine and coastal wildlife; tar balls on beaches; oil slicks on water; and oiled coastal habitats.

Massachusetts Audubon's American Kestrel Monitoring Project needs citizen scientists to record kestral sightings and breeding data in Massachusetts.

There are two ways to get involved:

1. Reporting: Seen a kestrel? You can report it online using the project's map tool. American Kestrels in Massachusetts breed between roughly May 10 to July 20. Simply record when and where you saw the bird, along with a brief note as to what it was doing. This information will help us choose good sites for new nest boxes!

2. Monitoring: If you've got a lot of time and enthusiasm, the project might be able to use your help as a volunteer Kestrel Box Monitor. Monitors will be assigned to check boxes frequently during the breeding season and to record important breeding data for use in evaluating the effectiveness of the program.

The American Kestrel is facing some serious challenges. Massachusetts Audubon would like to be prepared to meet those challenges for years to come, but they can't do it without your help!

Massachusetts Vernal Pool Salamander Migrations Study needs the public to document, through an online mapping interface, large migrations across roads of amphibians that breed in the state's vernal pools.

The project aims to minimize the impact of roads and traffic on rare and non-game wildlife, while improving highway safety, through cost-effective research, planning, and implementation of partnerships with citizens and communities of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Help contribute data and learn more about proactive efforts to protect rare wildlife in Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts Statewide Roadkill Database needs the public to document any roadkill observations in the state through an online mapping interface.

The project aims to minimize the impact of roads and traffic on rare and non-game wildlife, while improving highway safety, through cost-effective research, planning, and implementation of partnerships with citizens and communities of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Help contribute data and learn more about proactive efforts to protect wildlife in Massachusetts.

This project allows the public to document turtle roadkill observations in Massachusetts through an online mapping interface.

The project aims to minimize the impact of roads and traffic on rare and non-game wildlife, while improving highway safety, through cost-effective research, planning, and implementation of partnerships with citizens and communities of Massachusetts.

Help contribute data and learn more about proactive efforts to protect turtles and other wildlife in Massachusetts.

The Camas Citizen Science Monitoring Program seeks to engage high school volunteers in the long-term scientific monitoring of camas lily populations in the Weippe Prairie site of Nez Perce National Historical Park. Students are trained in the classroom and then spend time in the field using data collection techniques specifically designed for this program. Results of the monitoring effort are available to National Park Service managers so that they can make better management decisions based on sound, scientific information.

Camas is an important cultural and natural resource. For the last 7,000 years, camas has been an important part of the Nez Perce history, life and culture, as well as those of many other tribes of the Pacific Northwest. In addition, camas is one of a suite of wetland species associated with seasonal wet prairie ecosystems. However, as a result of recent agricultural conversion, irrigation, flood control, and other land use practices, remaining wet prairies in this region have been drastically reduced. Projected climate change will also impact these wet prairie ecosystems and monitoring camas populations will provide the National Park Service an opportunity to track climate change impacts on park natural resources.

Monitoring of camas and invasive weeds is a unique opportunity to integrate natural resource monitoring with the cultural history of the Nez Perce people. Citizen scientists will use carefully designed scientific procedures and modern technology to collect data, such as the number of camas plants and flowering plants and the presence of invasive species. Components of the program are tied to state science standards, and high school students will work alongside ecologists, statisticians, natural resource managers, and interpretive rangers.

Three local high schools are currently participating each year. This is a unique learning opportunity that students are sure to remember.

Volunteer birdwatchers with the Puget Sound Seabird Survey gather valuable data on wintering seabird populations in the Puget Sound. The project is organized by the Seattle Audubon Society.

During monthly winter surveys from October to April, volunteers identify and count birds from the Puget Sound shoreline using a protocol designed by leading seabird researchers. Volunteers count all species of coastal seabirds including geese, ducks, swans, loons, grebes, cormorants, gulls, terns, and alcids. These data will be used to create a snapshot of seabird density on more than three square miles of nearshore saltwater habitat.

Puget Sound Seabird Survey is the only land-based, multi-month survey in the central or south Puget Sound.

Orca Project volunteers in Port Townsend, Washington document orca bones for an online bone atlas, assist in orca education with children's groups, take part in assembling a full-size skeleton for display, participate in the design of a new orca exhibit and conduct research on underwater sounds using a hydrophone.

The project’s goals are to improve public awareness of the challenges faced by killer whales--toxic contamination, underwater noise pollution, and diminishing food supplies in the Puget Sound--as well as develop an appreciation for the whales’ remarkable social bonds and communication abilities.

Funded by the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, other organizations, and matching funds, the Orca Project will focus on both the transient and resident killer whales seen in the Northwest United States.

The Orca Project will also offer public lectures, free science classes for Olympic Peninsula students, tours of articulated whale skeletons for school classes, hands-on activities for after-school groups, Bring Your Bones Day (a community event with resident experts helping identify and reveal the mysteries of bones), and focused outreach to the maritime and marine community of Port Townsend, Washington.

Volunteers for the East Jefferson County Marine Mammal Stranding Network collect data on dead, stranded, or abandoned marine mammals at selected Washington State beaches. Participants also "pup sit" seal pups while they are being weaned onshore in order to keep curious dogs and humans at a safe distance while the mother seal hunts.

Volunteers sign up to cover particular beaches and are trained to respond and collect vital data that can be used to establish baseline information on marine mammal communities. The data will be used by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other organizations.

Using small telescopes around the world, Global Telescope Network members observe and analyze astronomical objects related to the NASA Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly GLAST), Swift, and XMM-Newton missions.

These missions are designed to study astronomical objects through their emission of x-rays and gamma rays. But much can be learned by combining observations over a broad range in the electromagnetic spectrum. So, the Global Telescope Network has been assembled to make observations in the optical range to complement the observations by space-borne observatories.

Members can participate in a number of activities, including gamma-ray burst photometry analysis, surveillance data analysis, and galaxy monitoring, and by donating telescope time. The Global Telescope Network in turn provides involvement for students, teachers, and amateur astronomers in cutting-edge astronomical research. It also offers mentoring in research practices, telescope use, data analysis, and educational resources.

Maryland's Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary needs volunteers to collect, count, and identify macroinvertebrates (small animals without backbones) in its streams. The sanctuary is in southern Anne Arundel County, 20 miles east Washington, D.C., and 18 miles south of Annapolis, Maryland.

One indicator of good water quality is a diverse and abundant population of macroinvertebrates. A dip in oxygen levels or a plume of pesticide can make a stream inhospitable to more sensitive animals.

Benthic macroinvertebrates--ones that dwell on the bottom of streams--can reveal much about the health of their watery environment. Since these animals more or less stay put, they are reliable indicators of water quality at each sampling site.

If you like to hike and wade in shallow streams, this project is for you! Monitoring takes place several times a year, and each sampling takes about two hours in the field and another two hours of processing in the lab.

Volunteers are needed to help the South Yuba River Citizens League, based in Nevada City, California, collect monthly water quality data at 45 different sites in the Yuba Watershed.

We are the leading regional advocates for creating resilient human and natural communities throughout the greater Yuba River basin by restoring creeks and rivers, regenerating wild salmon populations, and inspiring and organizing people—from the Yuba’s source to the sea—to join in our movement for a more wild and scenic Yuba River.

We train participants to use pH and conductivity meters and to conduct dissolved oxygen titrations in the field in order to collect information on the health of their rivers and streams. We also offer volunteers the opportunity to be involved in other monitoring activities, including health assessments of meadows, sampling of benthic macroinvertebrate and algae, surveys of river vegetation, and temperature logging.

The Coral Reef Monitoring Data Portal is a new tool designed to support, enhance, and widen the scope of existing monitoring efforts in Hawaii. The data portal was developed and is managed by the Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL). It was created in partnership with and in support of community-based monitoring programs coordinated by the State of Hawaii DLNR’s Division of Aquatic Resources, the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, Aquanimity Now, the Digital Bus, Project S.E.A.-Link, and other local organizations and agencies, through funding obtained from the Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

According to CORAL’s Hawaii Field Manager Liz Foote, “We wanted to develop a 'one-stop-shop' for community based coral reef 
monitoring in Hawaii. This site was developed in support of current efforts such 
as the University of Hawaii Botany Department and Division of Aquatic Resources' herbivore grazing protocols, and the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National 
Marine Sanctuary's water quality monitoring program. This online data entry and 
reporting system will greatly expand the scope and impact of these monitoring 
efforts, and the associated resources provided on the site will empower and equip 
many more community members to get involved.”

BEACH volunteers monitor high-risk Washington state beaches for bacteria. Beaches are considered high-risk when they have a lot of recreational users and are located near potential bacteria sources.

Monitoring can indicate pollution from sewage treatment plant problems, boating waste, malfunctioning septic systems, animal waste, or other sources of fecal pollution. BEACH volunteers monitor for an indicator bacteria called "enterococci." The presence of this bacteria at elevated levels means there is a potential for disease-causing bacteria and viruses to also be present.

BEACH is intended to reduce the risk of disease for people who play in saltwater. The program strives to educate the public about the risks associated with polluted water and what each of us can do to reduce that risk.

UPDATE: As for December 2012, the project is not accepting new volunteers.

State of the Oyster Study volunteers help monitor bacterial contamination levels in edible shellfish collected from privately owned Washington state beaches in Hood Canal and throughout Puget Sound

Volunteers collect oyster and clam samples from their beaches at specific times during summer months. Washington Sea Grant arranges for laboratory testing of these samples, which are analyzed for the presence of harmful bacteria or for bacterial indicators of fecal contamination. (Volunteers must cover the lab fees.) Washington Sea Grant then helps participants interpret their test results and, if needed, works closely with them to identify and remedy the sources of observed contamination.

Through the years, State of the Oyster has has helped waterfront residents on more than 300 Washington state beaches learn what makes for safer oysters and clams and how to minimize fecal contamination in their waters.

Since 2000, volunteers with Vermont's Black River Action Team have helped to clean up and take care of the Black River and its tributaries.

Among our activities are the WaterWorx Bug Hunts: Throughout the year, as a way of assessing the overall health and condition of the water, we explore what lives beneath the surface of the river. Larvae of caddisflies, stoneflies, and mayflies are the most commonly used critters for this purpose. We’ll gather aquatic insects from the bottom of the river, sort them by body type, then identify and count them. Over time, we’ll start to get a good picture of the quality of the river.

So all you folks near Windsor County, Vermont, grab some simple equipment and your sense of adventure: We're going on a Bug Hunt!

Seward Park is using Twitter and citizen scientists to monitor coyote populations in Seattle, Washington, and surrounding areas.

Volunteer contributors can tweet or e-mail coyote sightings, and project organizers will include these sightings in the official Coyote Map. This data will give researchers a better picture of where the coyotes are located, how often people see them, and maybe even what they're doing.

The Salish Sea Hydrophone Network needs volunteers to help monitor the critical habitat of endangered Pacific Northwest killer whales by detecting orca sounds and measuring ambient noise levels. Volunteers are especially needed to help notify researchers when orcas are in the Salish Sea, which encompasses the waters of Puget Sound and the surrounding area.

Sponsored by a coalition of organizations, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Whale Museum in Olympia, Washington, the network consists of five hydrophones, each hooked up to a computer to analyze the signal and stream it via the internet.

Even though software is used to distinguish animal from other underwater sound, human ears do a better job. So volunteers monitor the network from their home computers anywhere in the world, and alert the rest of the network when they hear whale sounds. Sometimes boats or onshore monitors are deployed to observe the whales while they are making sounds. Researchers hope to learn more about the uses of orca communications and whale migration patterns.

SoundCitizen is a community-based water sampling network in the Puget Sound area of Washington state. We’d love your help.

SoundCitizen focuses on scientific investigation and knowledge discovery of the chemical links between urban settings and aquatic systems. We study fun compounds (cooking spices) and serious ones (emerging pollutants).

We are staffed by undergraduate students at the University of Washington, whose individual research topics help define the overall scientific aims of the program.

SoundCitizen encourages involvement with citizen volunteers and school groups, who voluntarily collect water samples from aquatic systems, perform a series of simple chemical tests, and then mail samples to the lab to be analyzed for cooking spices and emerging pollutants. Our scientific findings illustrate strong seasonal links between household activities (cooking, cleaning etc.) and the subsequent release of chemical “fingerprints” of these activities in aquatic and marine environments.

Based in Australia, Seagrass-Watch recruits volunteers around the world to assess and monitor this ocean plant, which is an important indicator of the health of coastal environments. The project has participants at some 259 sites across 17 countries.

Working with a local coordinator, participants collect quantitative data on seagrasses and their associated fauna by means of simple, yet scientifically rigorous monitoring techniques. At least one participant at each monitoring event must have passed a Seagrass-Watch training course or have a degree (or similar) in environmental/marine science and be able to demonstrate competency in Seagrass-Watch methods and protocols. The information collected is used to assist the management of coastal environments and to prevent significant areas and species being lost.

Seagrasses, the only flowering plants that can live underwater, are the main diet of dugongs and green turtles, and provide a habitat for many, smaller marine animals, some of which, like prawns and fish, are commercially important. They also absorb nutrients from coastal run-off and stabilize sediment, helping to keep the water clear.

The Seagrass-Watch program has a simple philosophy of involving those who are concerned, and includes collaboration/partnerships between community, qualified scientists, and data users, such as environment management agencies.

Seward Park in Seattle, Washington, needs citizen volunteers to monitor the health of hemlock trees.

Some of the hemlocks in Seward Park have annosus root disease, and park officials are worried about them. Researchers are establishing a long-term monitoring plan for 20-30 hemlocks in the park. This will allow them to watch for the progression of the disease on the infected trees and keep an eye out for spreading problems.

Fortunately, this project will only take a few hours every few months, so participating is easy!

Seward Park in Seattle, Washington, needs citizen volunteers to help survey insect-eating bats and analyze the resulting data and images. This will help researchers determine which bats make Seward Park their home.

Seward Park has the potential to be the home of 13 species of insect-eating bats. Park researchers and volunteers use acoustic monitoring devices and sonobat software to translate the very high frequency bat calls into an image that allows one to differentiate between the species.

From May through October, Seward Park researchers and volunteers take acoustic monitoring equipment out into the park and see which bats are chirping through the forest and along the lake.

Seward Park in Seattle, Washington, needs citizen volunteers to conduct water chemistry tests during visits to the park.

Participants will use water chemistry test kits to monitor phosphates, dissolved oxygen, nitrates/nitrites, pH, and temperature at three locations around Seward Park.

After a short training course, volunteers are welcome to check out a kit and run the analysis any time. The more data, the better! Volunteers can even conduct tests during a lovely walk around the park -- it's exercise with a subplot!

Seward Park needs volunteers to monitor the plankton of Lake Washington in King County, Washington, over time to assess the health of the lake.

The research is based on the premise that plankton exhibit the effects of environmental change better than chemical or other physical data. Also, long-term monitoring of changes in species composition have signaled the beginning of a decline in European lakes and in Lake Washington in the past.

Volunteers take water samples from a few sites around the lake and count the different types of plankton under the microscope in a Seward Park laboratory. The project needs contributions in a variety of areas, including collecting, counting, and recording plankton.

INSPIRE volunteers use build-it-yourself kits to measure and record very low frequency radio emissions. These include naturally occurring "sferics" (short for "atmospherics") often generated by lightning and known as "tweeks," "whistlers," and "chorus" as well as man-made emissions.

There is a great deal of scientific curiosity about the nature and generation mechanisms of natural very low frequency radio emissions and how they interact with the Earth's ionosphere and magnetic fields. INSPIRE is taking an active role in furthering the investigation of very low frequency emissions by involving citizen volunteers in its research.

INSPIRE represents a rare opportunity to work with real NASA space scientists on real scientific problems.

COASST is a network of citizen scientists that monitor marine resources and ecosystem health at 300 beaches across northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.

Team volunteers pledge to survey their beach every month. In return, the COASST office pledges to put all of the data together, decipher the patterns across the entire survey range, and give that information back out to volunteers and the communities.

COASST believes that the citizens of coastal communities are essential scientific partners in monitoring marine ecosystem health. By collaborating with citizens, natural resource management agencies, and environmental organizations, COASST works to translate long-term monitoring into effective marine conservation solutions.

BeakGeek allows citizen scientists to share information about birds and bird sightings using freely available and simple social networking tools such as Twitter. BeakGeek adds value to the data created with these tools by providing map based visualizations and monitoring for terms such as "Rare Bird Alert".

Georgia Adopt-A-Stream needs citizens to monitor and improve the state's streams, wetlands, lakes, and estuaries.

The project goals are to increase public awareness of Georgia's water pollution and water quality issues, provide citizens with the tools and training to evaluate and protect their local waterways, encourage partnerships between citizens and their local government, and collect baseline water quality data.

Georgia Adopt-A-Stream has teamed up with government and non-government groups to provide access to technical information and assistance for citizens interested in preserving and restoring the banks and vegetation along their waterways. This network will help local governments, educate citizens about the importance of protecting riparian corridors, and provide landowners with the information they need to reduce erosion, improve water quality, and provide wildlife habitat with native plantings.

Tracking Climate in Your Backyard seeks to engage youth in real science through the collection, recording, and understanding of precipitation data in the forms of rain, hail, and snow.

The purpose of this project is to encourage youth, specifically ages 8-12, to better understand the scientific process by engaging them in the collection of meaningful meteorological data in their community. In this way, youth develop an understanding of scientific methods and standardization, and by recording and sharing their data through a citizen science project, they recognize the importance of accurate data collection. The citizen science portion of the project, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network, collects precipitation data for scientific analysis and for issuance of severe storm warnings and flash flooding events. We believe that when youth know they are contributing data to a real, scientific cause, their engagement levels rise.

This National Science Foundation-funded project is a collaboration between the Paleontological Research Institution and Museum of the Earth, which have experience in professional development and informal education, New York State 4-H, which provides an excellent outreach base and fosters hands-on, experiential learning for youth, and the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network, which runs a citizen science project to record precipitation measurements in an online database.

South American Wildlands and Biodiversity needs volunteers to help identify, describe, and protect wildland complexes and roadless areas in South America.

Volunteers will use Google Earth to identify and map existing roads in areas of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. Volunteers are needed who have access to Google Earth and are comfortable working on computers.

In addition, field volunteers are needed in South America to visit these areas on the ground and confirm the accuracy of the maps. Some of the more specialized tasks that field volunteers will perform include the use of global positioning system (GPS) and geographic information system (GIS) equipment, as well as recording photographs and notes about the areas visited.

The wildlands of South America present one of the most important reservoirs of biodiversity on the planet. Mapping South American Wildlands is an ambitious project of the Pacific Biodiversity Institute, with Latin American conservation partners, to map all the wildlands in South America, to evaluate their contribution to global biodiversity, and to share and disseminate this information.

This project will first focus on mapping and analyzing the roadless/undeveloped areas in the southern cone countries (Chile and Argentina) using a procedure that the Pacific Biodiversity Institute developed to map the wildlands of the United States in 2001.

The Harbor Porpoise Monitoring Project needs volunteers for observations and surveys at locations near Anacortes, Whidbey Island, and San Juan Island, Washington.

The historic range of the harbor porpoise has diminished dramatically in the last 60 years. Surveys of the population are done infrequently and there is inadequate data on the current status of the population.

Participants will help in assessing the feasibility of using passive acoustic monitoring devices to track population status and trends of this species. This may include land-based animal observations and/or handling instruments from a boat.

The Western Gray Squirrel Project needs volunteers to assist with surveys of this species' population in the Methow Watershed in Washington State.

The western gray squirrel is listed as threatened in Washington State, and the Methow Valley area is home of one of the last three populations remaining in the state.

The main goal for this project is to conduct distribution surveys and relative abundance estimates that will augment work being conducted by Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. This effort will further scientific knowledge about gray squirrel distributions throughout the Methow Valley.

Another goal is to conduct outreach to private landowners about western gray squirrel habitat and to educate the local community about the status of, threats to, and conservation needs of the squirrel.

There is potential for this project to lead to further work on western gray squirrels and other aspects of conservation science.

The Community Aquatic Monitoring Program works with volunteers to monitor the health and marine productivity of Canada's water ecosystem.

Volunteers collect biological data from live small fish and crustaceans that are captured and released. These data include the identification of fish and crustacean species; the numbers of fish and crustaceans; water temperature, salinity and dissolved oxygen; general aquatic vegetation profiles; and sediment and water samples.

With this information, scientists working with government agencies and universities can undertake nutrient analyses, organic loading assessments, and identify changes in the aquatic community structure. With this in hand, identification of cause may be determined and actions put into place to mitigate potential negative impacts.

Virginia's Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy needs citizen volunteers to identify aquatic insects in local streams. The type and quantity of these insects, called benthic macroinvertebrates, tell a good story about the quality of water in the stream and its surrounding habitat.

Monitoring is done in teams of three or four experienced and novice monitors who follow the Virginia Save Our Streams monitoring protocol. Team members wade into the stream and use collecting nets to capture live aquatic insects in the riffle and pool portions of the stream.

The data are transcribed to a computer database maintained by Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy and are used to prepare water quality reports. Because the same stream sites are sampled year after year, project coordinators are able to report on trends in the health of the streams and aquatic life.

The Hudson River Estuary Program and Scenic Hudson are working with citizen scientists to monitor herring and American eel in Ulster County's Black Creek Preserve.

Herring volunteers will observe the creek to see if, where, and when spawning runs occur. Those interested in eels will use nets and trap devices to catch juvenile glass eels, which are counted, weighed, and released unharmed.

Data may help biologists discover why populations of these important fish are declining.

Shark Trust is building a database of shark sightings across the ocean.

Submitting your sightings not only lets you share with the world the animals you have seen, but it also generates important data for researchers and conservationists working with sharks, skates and rays around the world. Your sightings will contribute to our understanding of many species, providing some of the best available data for their management, helping ensure a sustainable future for sharks, skates and rays.

Sightings submitted to Shark Trust will have many potential uses – from learning about the different colour morphologies of skates and rays around the British coast, to understanding the size of whale shark populations around the world. Any sighting or catch of wild elasmobranchs can be submitted to this database. The information is frequently used in not-for-profit decision-making, education, research, environmental and other public-benefit purposes.

The Quake-Catcher Network provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes.

The Quake-Catcher Network links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the world’s largest and densest earthquake monitoring system. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others.

The Quake-Catcher Network also provides a natural way to engage students and the public in earthquake detection and research. This project places USB-connectable sensors in K-12 classrooms as an educational tool for teaching science and a scientific tool for studying and monitoring earthquakes. Through a variety of interactive experiments students can learn about earthquakes and the hazards that earthquakes pose.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. Let's get to work!

The Urban Forest Map is a collaborative effort to map every tree in the city of San Francisco. As a citizen forester, you can get involved by searching for trees, verifying records, and by adding the trees in your neighborhood!

Along the way, researchers will use this data to calculate the environmental benefits that the trees are providing -- how many gallons of storm water they are helping to filter, how many pounds of air pollutants they are capturing, how many kilowatt-hours of energy they are conserving, and how many tons of carbon dioxide they are removing from the atmosphere. The information we gather will help urban foresters and city planners to better manage trees in specific areas, track and combat tree pests and diseases, and plan future tree plantings. Climatologists can use it to better understand the effects of urban forests on climates, and students and citizen scientists can use it to learn about the role trees play in the urban ecosystem.

The goal of Urban Forest Map is to provide a one-stop repository for tree data, welcoming information from any agency or group and enabling and celebrating citizen participation. Together, we'll work toward building a complete, dynamic picture of the urban forest.

Traverse Creek Stewardship (TraCkS) is a group of volunteers who monitor water quality in the Traverse Creek Watershed, which is located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in El Dorado County, California.

We are focused on establishing baseline data for water quality conditions in our watershed, to create educational opportunities, to increase stewardship awareness, and to determine if our watershed is healthy. Every year during June, we take "bug" samples at three locations in Traverse Creek. The rest of the year, we meet two nights a month to identify the insects and other small organisms.

No experience is required to participate in TraCkS activities. Our experienced volunteer leaders provide on-the-job training. The water quality of a stream is a combination of its physical, chemical, and biological characteristics. As volunteer citizen monitors, we visit five locations in the Traverse Creek watershed monthly to check on the health of our streams. We take samples of the water and check the temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, conductivity, and turbidity. We also take photos of the stream and sites to monitor changes in the riparian zone. Once a year we do a complete physical and biological assessment.

Vital Signs brings scientists and novices together to investigate species - particularly invasive species - in Maine.

People can participate in many ways: going outside to look for and document invasive and native species with digital images, location and habitat observations; then entering their observations into our online application; and commenting on shared observations from the comfort of their own homes.

GSWA's Stream Team monitors the five streams in the Great Swamp watershed, a 55-square-mile region in New Jersey's Morris and Somerset Counties.

Monitoring includes both chemical and visual assessments. The primary goal of the chemical monitoring program is to measure the volume of water, nutrients, and sediments flowing into the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. The main purpose of the visual assessment program is to help gather data for the Watershed Association and the State on water bodies that are not currently being assessed by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. All of this data helps to generate a picture of the overall health of our streams and identify areas where where water quality improvements could be made.

The streams within the watershed are the Upper Passaic River, Black Brook, Great Brook, Loantaka Brook, and Primrose Brook, all of which flow into Great Swamp and exit as the Passaic River via Millington Gorge.

Join us in the search for interstellar dust! On January 15, 2006, the Stardust spacecraft's sample return capsule parachuted gently onto the Utah desert. Nestled within the capsule were precious particles collected during Stardust's dramatic encounter with comet Wild 2 in January of 2004; and something else, even rarer and no less precious: tiny particles of interstellar dust that originated in distant stars, light-years away. They are the first such pristine particles ever collected in space, and scientists are eagerly waiting for their chance to "get their hands" on them.

Before they can be studied, though, these tiny interstellar grains will have to be found. This will not be easy. Unlike the thousand of particles of varying sizes collected from the comet, scientists estimate that Stardust collected only around 45 interstellar dust particles. They are tiny - only about a micron (a millionth of a meter) in size! These miniscule particles are embedded in an aerogel collector 1,000 square centimeters in size. To make things worse, the collector plates are interspersed with flaws, cracks, and an uneven surface. All this makes the interstellar dust particles extremely difficult to locate.

This is where you come in!

By asking for help from talented volunteers like you from all over the world, we can do this project in months instead of years. Of course, we can't invite hundreds of people to our lab to do this search-we only have two microscopes! To find the elusive particles , therefore, we are using an automated scanning microscope to automatically collect images of the entire Stardust interstellar collector at the Curatorial Facility at Johnson Space Center in Houston. We call these stacks of images focus movies. All in all there will be nearly a million such focus movies. These are available to Stardust@home users like you around the world. You can then view them with the aid of a special Virtual Microscope (VM) that works in your web browser.

Together, you and thousands of other Stardust@home participants will find the first pristine interstellar dust particles ever brought to Earth!

In recognition of the critical importance of the Stardust@home volunteers, the discoverer of an interstellar dust particle will appear as a co-author on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home team announcing the discovery of the particle. The discoverer will also have the privilege of naming the particle!

Students from five diverse New Jersey high schools use kits purchased with funding from the EPA , the CMX Community Foundation and the RBC Blue Water Project of the Royal Bank of Canada Foundation to measure water quality variables such as dissolved oxygen, water clarity and phosphorus. They are also collecting and identifying macroinvertebrates such as dragonfly nymphs, blackfly larvae and snails that indicate pollution levels in a waterbody.

Students are entering their collected data into a Web-based program created by NJDEP that allows them to analyze data and compare it with data collected at other sites.

The Passaic River Institute PREEMO web site provides links to relevant educational materials and links to other data sets about the river. It will provide a forum where students can post their impressions and questions about ecology and environmental science.

At the end of the school year, the students come together at Montclair State University for a student conference where they present a study they have conducted involving their work on the Passaic River.

Monitor the waters of six counties in Central Wisconsin: Fond du Lac, Green Lake, Marquette, Waushara, Waupaca, and Winnebago. We are a waders on, in-the-muck environmental group.

Performed monthly on local waters within these six counties, we test for dissolved oxygen, turbidity, temperature, and stream flow. At the beginning of summer we also perform a Biotic Index and habitat assessment. Information is entered into a state database for tracking purposes.

Have you seen a jellyfish on the beach? Report it to Jellywatch -- a public database documenting ocean conditions. We are especially interested in jellyfish washing up, but we also track red tides, squid and mammal strandings, and other indicators of ocean health.

All the data and images that are submitted are freely and instantly available for bulk download, so students, teachers, and scientists can conduct their own research using information gathered from around the globe.

Volunteers wade through creeks in Contra Costa County (California), using the latest technology and scientific protocols to collect baseline data on our local watersheds. Our two primary programs are Bioassessment sampling and GPS Creek Surveys.

Bioassessment - Using aquatic insects as indicators of water quality, volunteers learn more about the health of their neighborhood creeks and identify potential problem areas. While water samples yield a detailed identification of the water at the time of sampling, the density and diversity of bugs in our creeks yield a watershed-level perspective of water quality and habitat viability over time.

GPS Creek Surveys - Using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, volunteers map the physical attributes of the stream channel (substrate, canopy cover, bank characteristics, etc.), extent and type of native and invasive vegetation, and human influences (outfalls, dams, etc.).

Joining a data collection event is a fun way to explore parts of your urban environment most people never see, but they are more than just fun ... they’re science!

Volunteers are provided with equipment and training to collect and process lake water quality samples 8 times each season. Volunteers also take temperature and water clarity measurements in the field at each sampling event. The sampling and processing takes about an hour.

Processed samples are stored by the volunteer until LMVP staff collect them for analysis at the University of Missouri's Limnology Laboratory. At the lab, samples are analyzed for total phosphorus, total nitrogen (plant nutrients), chlorophyll concentration (an estimate of algal biomass) and inorganic suspended solids (sediments).

Klamath Riverkeeper is excited to bring citizen monitoring to the Shasta watershed in 2010 with our first citizen water quality monitoring initiative. We’ll start by training citizens to collect water quality data at points on Yreka Creek and the Shasta River this spring & summer.

The goals of the program are to:
1) Fill a recognized scientific monitoring gap in the Klamath and Shasta River watersheds,
2) Add monitoring capacity to existing and future restoration and stream assessment projects,
3) Provide an educational outreach opportunity to the public in the City of Yreka.

WV Save Our Streams trains citizen scientists in West Virginia how to monitor and become watchdogs over their local wadeable streams and rivers. The program focuses on a biological approach to stream study, which includes the collection and evaluation of the benthic macroinvertebrate community and an assessment of the stream’s basic physiochemical conditions.

Our volunteer monitors help to track the health of the Willamette River in northwestern Oregon. By describing current conditions and identifying trends, we can detect and document changes in water quality and work toward a cleaner river.

The data we collect can be used to protect the health of those who depend on the river, be they human, plant, or animal. The data is also made available to the community, and can also be used to address problems in water quality by indicating when water-related regulations are not being met. Water Quality Monitoring is one step in the process of encouraging community growth that is compatible with the surrounding environment. Our monitoring program’s existence depends on dedicated volunteers who collect quality data each month.

All Missourians rely on streams in one way or another and many of our streams could use a little help. They need teams of people who love clean water, good fishing and health habitat to take care of them, year after year. That's why the Missouri Department of Conservation, the Department of Natural Resources and the Conservation Federation of Missouri joined to develop the Stream Team Program in 1989.

Promoting citizen awareness and involvement, Stream Teams is a fun, hands-on program for people who want to learn about, care for and protect local waterways. If you are ready to tackle the fun of protecting Missouri's streams start a Stream Team.

Anyone can start a Stream Team:

Individuals and Families: If there is a stream in your community that you and your neighbors are concerned about, you can form a Stream Team to adopt it.

Schools and youth groups: Stream Team is a great way for schools, colleges and universities to teach students about stream ecology while restoring and protecting a local stream.

Community, church of service groups: What better way to serve your community than by adopting, cleaning up and maintaining the health and beauty of a neighborhood waterway?

RiverSweep is an annual event. Fish for shopping carts or gather trash from shore: Do your part to keep Vermont's Black River clean!

You can help in Springfield, Ludlow, Plymouth, Cavendish or any other point on the Black River in Windsor County, Vermont. Work can be done from a kayak or canoe if you have one or from shore (watch for poison ivy!). Stay for an hour, or the whole morning! We'll provide trash bags, snacks, work gloves, a free lunch and a complimentary "thank you" tee shirt.

You can help ChargeCar make electric vehicles more practical and affordable by sharing GPS data from your regular car trips. Contributing your commute data to ChargeCar helps us better understand the driving habits and needs of everyday commutes.

You do not need an electric car to contribute to our project. On our website you calculate the cost of commuting with an electric car using your actual commute data, compare the efficiency of gasoline and electric cars for your trips, browse commutes across the country or work on a smart controller for our programming contest.

Use your mobile phone to help us locate invasive plants!

Invasive weeds are a significant threat to native plants and animals. Although most non-natives are not considered "invasive", those that crowd out food sources for wild animals, create erosion, or act as a significant fire hazard can be considered a threat and need to be identified and located for removal. You can help!

Then, using your Android mobile phone, help us locate invasive plants in an expanding number of locations across the US, or you can create your own list of plants that you want help in locating.

Our iPhone app currently works only in the Santa Monica National Recreation Area but is being updated soon.

The plants you identify will be placed on public map and alert park rangers of the spread of these habitat-destroying plants.

You can also participate using any mobile phone with text or picture messaging, email, or our web forms and a digital camera.

The Reef Volunteer Fish Survey allows volunteer SCUBA divers and snorkelers to collect and report information on marine fish populations as well as selected invertebrate and algae species along the West Coast of the US and Canada. Keep track of the fish you see while scuba diving or snorkeling. Submit those to an online database.

This is a worldwide program for:
Pacific Coast
Tropical Eastern Pacific
Tropical Western Atlantic
Hawaii
NE US and Canada

A recent issue of Make magazine (http://makezine.com/15/) was devoted to build-them-yourself, high-tech musical instruments. Among the most impressive is a laser harp invented by tech musician Stephen Hobley.

You coax out the computer-generated sounds by waving your hands to break the light beams and change their lengths.

To build a laser harp, you’ll need to be comfortable with such things as MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technology, circuit boards, photo cells, voltage regulators, and computers. If you’re not a serious amateur music technologist who’s been tinkering for years in the garage, you’ll need to buy or collect a significant amount of hardware and software.

Stephen’s article in Make does include a simpler project—a single-beam “laser theremin,” as opposed to the six-beam laser harp. But even that’s a pretty complex gizmo.

Related Material:
* To see and hear Stephen playing his harp, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCgMsrSaYwY&feature=player_embedded.
* Build a Laser Harp, Make Music With Light (Science Cheerleader): http://www.sciencecheerleader.com/2008/10/build_a_laser_harp_make_music_with_light/

Volunteers-In-Parks participants work side-by-side with National Park Service employees to preserve the United States' natural and cultural legacy and to help visitors discover the resources, meanings, and values found in its national parks.

Anyone can be a "VIP": individuals, couples, families, students, and organized groups from all over the United States and the world. Become a VIP and put yourself at the heart of the park experience!

Volunteers-In-Parks participants play an ever-increasing role in national parks through a variety of jobs, including answering visitor questions at an information desk, presenting living history demonstrations in period costumes, building fences, painting buildings, making cabinets, giving guided nature walks and evening campfire programs, assisting with preservation of museum artifacts, maintaining trails, building boardwalks, designing computer programs or park websites, and serving on a bike, horseback, or beach patrol.

National Park Service internships provide learning opportunities through activities such as wilderness re-vegetation, assistance with preservation and restoration projects, water quality monitoring, surveying, educational cave tours, or assisting resource management staff.

Internships offer an interesting and educational experience in some of the most beautiful areas of the country. This is your chance to get actively involved in the stewardship of the United States' national and natural treasures.

Geoscientists-in-the-Parks partners geoscience students and experts with volunteers to conduct scientific research that helps the National Park Service better understand and manage its natural resources.

Participants may assist with research, synthesis of scientific literature, geologic mapping, geographic information system analysis, site evaluations, resource inventorying and monitoring, impact mitigation, developing brochures and informative media presentations, and educating park staff as well as park visitors.

Volunteers selected for the program have a unique opportunity to contribute to a variety of important research, resource management, interpretation and education projects. Parks benefit from a participant’s knowledge and skills in geological or physical sciences, while each participant gains valuable experience by working with the National Park Service. Volunteers with all levels of experience are encouraged to apply.

This sponge monitoring program calls on citizen scientists to submit observations of sponges in local waterways to help biologists prioritize future survey efforts. Freshwater sponges are aquatic animals that grow in lakes, rivers, bogs, and streams attached to submerged rocks, sticks, logs, or aquatic vegetation.

These sedentary animals feed by filtering small particles from the water and are thought to be sensitive indicators of pollution. Limited research seems to indicate that the range of some sponge species is more restricted now than in previous years. This study tries to shed more light on how abundant and widely distributed Wisconsin’s sponges are today.

The Citizens and Remote Sensing Observational Network is a central network of citizen scientists who share and communicate data. Environmental groups, science-focused institutions, and any individuals who are interested in environmental observations can participate.

Participants make important observations of their local environment based on their personal interest. In many cases, these observations may be helpful in improving a participant's community and quality of life. The network also gives citizen scientists a place to share and discuss their observations and ideas. Participants may also attend monthly meetings to share ideas, hear speakers, and network with other citizen scientists and professionals.

Open Street Map is a free, interactive map that allows anyone to view, edit, and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth. The project was started because many maps available online have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways.

Contributors to Open Street Map take handheld global positioning system (GPS) devices with them on journeys or go out specially to record GPS tracks. They record street names, village names, and other features using notebooks, digital cameras, and voice-recorders. Back at the computer, contributors upload those GPS logs showing where they traveled and trace out the roads on Open Street Map's collaborative database. Using their notes, contributors add the street names, connections between roads, and other information such as the type of road or path. That data is then processed to produce detailed street-level maps, which can be published freely on sites such as Wikipedia, used to create handheld or in-car navigation devices, or printed and copied without restriction.

The Shermans Creek Watershed Monitoring Program calls on citizen scientists to conduct water quality sampling and to measure biological factors that indicate the health of the Pennsylvania creek and its response to pollution.

Volunteers measure nitrate, temperature, dissolved oxygen, alkalinity, pH, and turbidity, and conduct regular bacteria monitoring and macroinvertebrate sampling at sites throughout the watershed. The data will be used to provide public education, target areas for restoration and protection projects, and help the county and municipalities with land development plans that protect Shermans Creek.

LHC@home is a volunteer grid computing program that enables you to contribute idle time on your computer to help physicists develop and exploit particle accelerators, such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

LHC@home will leverage your computer's processing power, disk space, and network bandwidth, along with thousands of other computers over the Internet. Through this combined computing power, physics researchers around the world can better analyze and store massive amounts of critical scientific data.

The National Science Digital Library encourages citizens to help enlarge and strengthen their library of high quality resources and tools that support science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

Developers of content in these subject areas, National Science Foundation grantees, educators and learners, and all other members of the community are welcome to recommend digital resources for the library. These resources include activities, lesson plans, Web sites, simulations, or any materials that help educators meet the demands of an increasingly complex technology-based world.

As a national network of learning environments, resources, and partnerships, the National Science Digital Library seeks to serve a vital role in educational cyberlearning for the nation, meeting the informational and technological needs of educators and learners at all levels.

The Juvenile Lobster Monitoring Program is a community-based research program that aims to measure the health and productivity of lobster nursery habitats over space and time. The project measures the abundance and distribution of juvenile lobsters and uses marking and recapture techniques to investigate growth rates and survival.

Program scientists have developed a set of rigorous training tools to teach volunteers how to census lobsters at nursery grounds in the lower intertidal zone. The census data collected by volunteers are extremely valuable as indicators of lobster fishery health because the juvenile lobsters of today represent the catches of tomorrow.

Anyone with the time and inclination (and a good pair of boots!) can participate in this program. It's easy and it's fun. Involving volunteers of different age groups and backgrounds aids in community building and provides public access to scientific research and knowledge. This project can thereby help to bridge the gap between science and the public through hands-on training and accessible learning.

The Marine Mammal Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to the rescue, rehabilitation, and release of injured, sick, and orphaned marine mammals. The Center relies heavily on a dynamic volunteer work force comprised of more than 800 individuals from Mendocino to San Luis Obispo counties. Volunteers handle everything from cleaning pens to preparing food, updating medical charts, administering antibiotics, and taking blood samples.

Volunteering at The Marine Mammal Center is fun and a great way to meet others who share a concern for wildlife and the ocean environment. Your special talents can make an important contribution!

Project Implicit is an opportunity for citizens to assist psychological research on thoughts and feelings that exist either outside of conscious awareness or outside of conscious control. Participants assess their conscious and unconscious preferences for more than 90 different topics ranging from pets to political issues, ethnic groups to sports teams, and entertainers to styles of music. Participants report attitudes toward or beliefs about these topics and provide general information about themselves.

The primary goals of Project Implicit are to provide a safe, secure, and well-designed virtual environment to investigate psychological issues and, at the same time, provide visitors and participants with an experience that is both educational and engaging.

The US Geological Survey's Twitter Earthquake Detection Program gathers real-time, earthquake-related messages from Twitter and applies place, time, and keyword filtering to gather geo-located accounts of shaking.

This approach provides rapid first-impression narratives and, potentially, photos from citizens at the hazard’s location. The potential for earthquake detection in regions that are populated but where seismic instruments are sparse is also being investigated.

Data from the project will support other earthquake projects that rapidly detect and report earthquake locations and magnitudes in the United States and globally. The Program will also determine the best way to broadcast scientifically confirmed earthquake alerts via Twitter.

NASA needs your help to monitor the rates and sizes of large meteoroids striking the moon's dark side. By monitoring the moon for impacts, NASA can define the meteoroid environment and identify the risks that meteors pose to future lunar exploration. This data will help engineers design lunar spacecraft, habitats, vehicles, and extra-vehicular activity suits to protect human explorers from the stresses of the lunar environment.

CONE-Welder is an online game in which participants use a robotic web camera to help Smithsonian Institution researchers document the presence of subtropical birds that may be affected by global warming.

CONE-Welder is part of a larger project, Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments, which provides an opportunity for groups of citizens, via the internet, to remotely observe, record, and index detailed animal activity. The goal is to advance the fundamental understanding of automated and collaborative systems and to observe and record detailed natural behavior in remote settings.

EpiCollect is a mobile phone application that allows professional and citizen scientists to gather, submit, and access research data through a central web database. The software is powered by Google Maps and Android, Google's open-source operating system.

EpiCollect was designed for epidemiological and ecological studies but has potential for a number of other fields, including economics, public health, and resource allocation. Individual users can input data (variables, photos, location, etc.) into EpiCollect from their mobile phone, which is synchronized to a central database. An accompanying web application provides a common location for mapping, visualization, and analysis of the data by everyone involved in the study.

World Water Monitoring Day is an international program that encourages citizen volunteers to monitor their local water bodies. An easy-to-use test kit enables everyone from children to adults to sample local water bodies for basic water quality parameters: temperature, acidity (pH), clarity (turbidity), and dissolved oxygen.

Though World Water Monitoring Day is officially celebrated on September 18, the monitoring window is extended to cover the period from March 22 (World Water Day) until December 31. Participants are encouraged to make their observations at anytime within that extended window.

The results of current and past studies are shared with participating communities around the globe through the organization's online Data & Reports page.

Botanicalls provides an opportunity for plants that might otherwise be neglected to request assistance. When a plant needs water, a moisture-sensing system alerts its caretaker via call, text message, or Twitter.

Botanicalls opens a new channel of communication between plants and humans in an effort to promote successful inter-species understanding.

The Citizen Weather Observer Program is a group of ham radio operators and other private citizens around the country who have volunteered the use of their weather data for education, research, and use by interested parties. There are currently over 8,000 registered members worldwide and over 500 different user organizations. Their weather data are used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and distributed to user organizations.

The Citizen Weather Observer Program is a public-private partnership with three main goals:

1. Collect weather data contributed by citizens
2. Make these data available for weather services and homeland security
3. Provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality.

ReefBase gathers available knowledge about coral reefs into one information repository. It is intended to facilitate analysis and monitoring of coral reef health and the quality of life of reef-dependent people, and to support informed decisions about coral reef use and management.

A great part of the coral reef resources in the world are in danger of destruction due to over exploitation, degradation of habitat, and changes in global climate. Globally, the resulting loss of income from fisheries is estimated to be billions of dollars a year and affects many millions of people. With this in mind, ReefBase has the following goals:

- Improve sharing and use of data, information, and knowledge in support of research and management of coral reef resources.
- Be the first place where scientists, managers, other professionals, as well as the wider public go for relevant data, information, publications, literature, photos, and maps related to coral reefs.
- Provide free and easy access to data and information on the location, status, threats, monitoring, and management of coral reef resources in over 100 countries and territories.

FishBase is an information system with key data on the biology of all fishes. The information will be used to create up-to-date distribution maps to assist in monitoring trends in biodiversity.

Divers, anglers, aquarists, and researchers can create their personal or institutional databases of where and when they have seen, caught, or acquired a particular fish. Biodiversity managers can create national fish biodiversity databases to keep track of local regulations and uses. Anthropologists can create a database on local knowledge about fish.

Similar to an encyclopedia, FishBase offers different things for different people. Fishery managers, teachers and students, taxonomists, conservationists, policymakers, research scientists, funding agencies, zoologists and physiologists, ecologists, geneticists, and the fishing industry, anglers, and scholars will find more than 100,000 common names of fishes together with the language/culture in which they are used and comments on their etymology.

Crayon Physics is an innovative physics puzzle game in which you get to experience what it would be like if drawings you create on your computer were magically transformed into real physical objects. Through 70 levels, your success relies on nothing but your imagination, creativity, and ability to wield a miniature crayon.

Earthdive is a global citizen science project that calls on recreational scuba divers and snorkelers to monitor the ocean for key indicator species.

When you participate in Earthdive, your observations are recorded in a special database known as the Global Dive Log and are accessible through a clever Google mapping interface. Over time, observations are aggregated to create a Global Snapshot of the state of the world’s oceans.

In addition to being an international research project, Earthdive is also an advocacy conduit for marine conservation. Each contributor's name is added to a petition demanding action from policymakers to help protect our oceans.

Earthdive is a revolutionary new concept in citizen science and a global research project for millions of recreational scuba divers who can help preserve the health and diversity of our oceans.

EnvironMentors provides mentors to high school students from under-represented backgrounds for college degree programs in environmental and related science fields. The program matches minority high school students with college and university faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and science and environmental professionals, in one-to-one mentoring relationships. Working together, students and mentors develop rigorous environmental science research projects over the course of the academic year.

In the spring, EnvironMentors students present their projects to elementary school classes in their respective school districts and to a team of judges at each chapter's EnvironMentors Fair. The top three students from each chapter travel to Washington, D.C., to present their project at the National EnvironMentors Fair.

EnvironMentors' integrative approach to identifying pressing environmental issues through hands-on application of the scientific method supported by a mentor has proven beneficial all students and life-changing for some.

CureTogether is a worldwide health research project that brings patients and researchers together to find cures for some of the most painful, prevalent, and chronic conditions. Users anonymously track their own health care data, including medication schedules, symptoms, and treatment plans, and provide it other participants around the world.

By making aggregate health data available for analysis, CureTogether provides a conduit for citizens to work together to better understand their bodies, make more informed treatment decisions, and influence scientific research.

NASA's Radio JOVE project enables students and amateur scientists to observe natural radio emissions from Jupiter, the Sun, and our galaxy. Participants learn about radio astronomy first-hand by building their own radio telescope from an inexpensive kit and/or using remote radio telescopes through the Internet. They also collaborate with each other through interactions and sharing of data on the network.

The Radio JOVE project began in 1998. Since then, more than 1,600 teams of students and interested individuals have purchased non-profit radio telescope kits and are learning radio astronomy by building and operating a radio telescope. This self-supporting, non-profit program continues to thrive and inspire new groups of students as well as individuals.

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.

We’re collecting data to find out if humans' pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!

Knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small protein can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers.

Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.