Mobilize hundreds of years of biodiversity information with WeDigBio!

By: Dr. Libby Ellwood Each year, millions of people flock to natural history museums to see examples of plants, animals, gemstones and more from places around the world. But what those visitors don’t get to see are the countless additional specimens behind the scenes. These specimen collections, housed at museums, universities, and other institutions, are … Read more “Mobilize hundreds of years of biodiversity information with WeDigBio!”

Categories: Citizen Science, Guest Contributor, Project Profile

DeepMoji: Citizen science to create emotional AI algorithms

Detecting emotional concepts, such as sarcasm, within a text is not an easy task for an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm. For instance, consider the sentence below. Without the emoji present it’s not clear what the author was feeling. The author could have been sad because of a lack of a special someone in his life … Read more “DeepMoji: Citizen science to create emotional AI algorithms”

Categories: Citizen Science, Guest Contributor, Project Profile

Digital Disaster Relief: Crowdsourced Responses to Hurricanes, Earthquakes, and Floods Around the World

By: Lily Bui In the brief span of two months, a series of disasters have swept across the globe. Hurricanes in the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean left homes, businesses, and streets flooded, disarmed power grids and basic services, and devastated the communities that rely on them. An earthquake in Mexico spurred mass evacuations and … Read more “Digital Disaster Relief: Crowdsourced Responses to Hurricanes, Earthquakes, and Floods Around the World”

Categories: Citizen Science, Climate & Weather, Project Profile

Help Cornell Researchers Find the Lost Ladybugs

By: Megan Ray Nichols It’s always fun to have a ladybug land on your arm while outside — but these days, it’s more and more likely that any ladybugs landing on you or the plants in your garden are not native to North America. Over the past three decades, several ladybug species native to North … Read more “Help Cornell Researchers Find the Lost Ladybugs”

Categories: Citizen Science, Girl Scouts, Guest Contributor, Insects, Project Profile

The Sky is Falling! Or is It?

By Dolores Hill and Carl Hergenrother, Target Asteroids! Co-Leads Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission Today’s amateur astronomers carry on long held traditions in citizen science by making valuable contributions in data collection and monitoring celestial objects of all kinds. They supplement work done by professional astronomers and fill gaps … Read more “The Sky is Falling! Or is It?”

Categories: Astronomy & Space, Citizen Science, Project Profile

Science Experiments for the Public during the Solar Eclipse

By Dr. Liz MacDonald, founder of Aurorasaurus and scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This blog reposted from blog.aurorasaurus.org. Over a century ago, American astronomer W.W. Campbell set up a 40 foot ‘Schaeberle camera’ in Jeur, India to take pictures and study various properties of the sun’s outermost layer called the corona during the … Read more “Science Experiments for the Public during the Solar Eclipse”

Categories: Astronomy & Space, Citizen Science, Guest Contributor, Project Profile

Weeding: It’s Not Just for Gardeners

By Kayla Keyes, Mote Marine Laboratory Recent news about Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has been grim: the most recent aerial survey of the reef identified a stretch of bleached coral over 900 miles (1500 km) long, and scientists have declared the reef to be in a terminal stage. Studies have shown that losing the Great … Read more “Weeding: It’s Not Just for Gardeners”

Categories: Citizen Science, Guest Contributor, Ocean & Water, Project Profile

Love Monarchs? Participate in the Monarch Monitoring Blitz This Week!

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

Categories: Citizen Science, Ecology & Environment, Events, Project Profile

Finding the Common Culture: Uniting Science and the Humanities in Citizen Science

By Brad Mehlenbacher (North Carolina State University) and Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher (University of Waterloo) Through citizen science projects, the Bodleian Library is improving access to their music collections, the Smithsonian is transcribing important documents, and researchers at the University of Oxford are transcribing Ancient Greek text from Greco-Roman Egypt. Although these projects represent promising examples … Read more “Finding the Common Culture: Uniting Science and the Humanities in Citizen Science”

Categories: Citizen Science, Citizen Science News, Guest Contributor

Stall Catchers citizen science game to host its first international “Catchathon”

If you’re familiar with “hackathons” – intense hacking marathons, or “mapathons” – mapping parties commonly held by mappers worldwide, the term “catchathon” might be starting to make some sense by now. If not – read on. There’s a marathon of Alzheimer’s citizen science coming on July 22nd, and you can be part of it!

Categories: Citizen Science, Events, Health