With spring here, and many people finding themselves with more free time on their hands this month, it’s a perfect time to explore the natural world.
And for people who join one of many citizen science projects, that exploration can be a meaningful contribution to the scientific community.
One resource, citizenscience.gov, is a federal website managed by the U.S. General Services Administration that encourages crowdsourcing and citizen science projects.
The website explains the concepts of citizen science and crowdsourcing.
“In citizen science, the public participates voluntarily in the scientific process, addressing real-world problems in ways that may include formulating research questions, conducting scientific experiments, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting results, making new discoveries, developing technologies and applications, and solving complex problems,” the website states.
“In crowdsourcing, organizations submit an open call for voluntary assistance from a large group of individuals for online, distributed problem solving,” the site explains.
At citizenscience.gov, visitors can sort active projects by field of science or by agency. There are hundreds from which to choose.
Projects include an Orphan Well Location Survey (OWLS), which is targeting western Pennsylvania and northeastern Oklahoma and looking for volunteers to help with its goal of locating abandoned and orphaned oil and natural gas wells.
What about Monarch Health, a project across North America that asks volunteers to help keep track of the spread of a protozoan parasite in wild monarch butterflies.
Or maybe others will be more interested in By the People, a program that invites people worldwide to transcribe, review and tag Library of Congress digitized historical documents.
Another good source to discover projects is zooniverse.org, a platform for “people-powered research” happening around the world.
“You don’t need any specialised background, training, or expertise to participate in any Zooniverse projects,” the website explains. “We make it easy for anyone to contribute to real academic research, on their own computer, at their own convenience.”
Volunteers can help with everything from understanding the historical nesting patterns of robins to identifying supermassive black holes.
People interested in studying the universe, NASA has a page for its citizen science projects at https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience
Projects are marked as to whether they involve the universe, the solar system, the sun or the earth, and many of them “can be done by anyone, anywhere, with just a cellphone or laptop,” the webpage states.
For those with a competitive spirit who like the possibility of winning prize money, challenge.gov might be more their style. This site lists a variety of real-world problems for which the U.S. government is seeking solutions.
Like citizenscience.gov, challenge.gov is managed by the U.S. General Services Administration.
Challenge participants can compete with others on tasks like helping mitigate the hazards of transporting lithium batteries, or helping NASA design an obstacle avoidance sensor for its clockwork rover.
They can compete for $1.1 million in prizes for designing Augmented Reality interfaces that advance first responder communications.
The website offers a comprehensive toolkit to assist participants in meeting their chosen challenges.
