Twice a day, every day, Kera Mathes hops aboard a ship that sets off from Long Beach Harbor in California. As education specialist at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific, she helps visitors aboard the ship identify the animals they see. Mathes also supervises the aquarium’s interns (college students and recent graduates), as they…

Read More

We could have filled this month’s edition of Citizen Science Today with articles from this special edition of JCOM. Instead, follow the link below to read widely and deeply about the field. – CJL – JCOM is an open access journal on science communication. Since the world of communication and the scientific community are now…

Read More

Abstract: The contribution of non-experts to environmental management has been significant and continues to flourish through their participation in citizen science. Despite its growth as an interdisciplinary field of enquiry, there are many gaps in our understanding of the role that citizen science may play in the future of environmental management. In Ontario, Canada, due…

Read More

Abstract: We investigate the development of scientific content knowledge of volunteers participating in online citizen science projects in the Zooniverse (http://www.zooniverse.org). We use econometric methods to test how measures of project participation relate to success in a science quiz, controlling for factors known to correlate with scientific knowledge. Citizen scientists believe they are learning about…

Read More

Earth could contain nearly 1 trillion species, with only one-thousandth of 1 percent now identified, according to the results of a new study. The estimate, based on universal scaling laws applied to large datasets, appears today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The report’s authors are Jay Lennon and Kenneth Locey…

Read More

Abstract: The human auditory system is adept at detecting sound sources of interest from a complex mixture of several other simultaneous sounds. The ability to selectively attend to the speech of one speaker whilst ignoring other speakers and background noise is of vital biological significance—the capacity to make sense of complex ‘auditory scenes’ is significantly…

Read More

This isn’t a new book, but it’s an interesting take on an old story not much discussed in the citizen science community. Perhaps historians of twentieth century citizen science are needed alongside their more common nineteenth century colleagues. – CJL – Technological advances come in such small increments that we rarely think about their accumulated…

Read More

Abstract: The participation of non-professionally trained people in so-called citizen science (CS) projects is a much discussed topic at the moment. Frequently, however, the contribution of citizens is limited to only a few narrow tasks. Focusing on an initiative dedicated to the study of the human microbiome, this paper describes such a case where citizen…

Read More

Abstract: Citizen science has the potential to expand the scope and scale of research in ecology and conservation, but many professional researchers remain skeptical of data produced by nonexperts. We devised an approach for producing accurate, reliable data from untrained, nonexpert volunteers. On the citizen science website www.snapshotserengeti.org, more than 28,000 volunteers classified 1.51 million images…

Read More

Given the wide geographic scope of dragonfly migration, citizen-science observations are critical to furthering knowledge of this remarkable behavior. Our understanding of the migration phenomenon in dragonflies has advanced as engagement in Migratory Dragonfly Partnership projects soar across North America. Now 1,000-strong, MDP’s volunteer network has helped reveal several insights into the behavior and seasonal…

Read More