Several years ago, I became a citizen scientist by joining Zooniverse, a platform that recruits people to help add more eyes to data to help further scientific inquiry. One of the projects I helped with included reading and transcribing original Civil War journals and telegraphed messages before the old ink on them faded into nothingness.
I also counted bats flying in and out of caves, identified celestial images and identified the animals feeding on offal after a deer hunt.
A variety of projects make them fun for citizen scientists with any interest. Each project starts with training on how to recognize and identify the subject with practice exercises and consultation with experts if necessary.
Because my vision has deteriorated, I am less able to do many of the projects so I thought I would pass the information along here hoping to recruit more volunteers who can take my place. Children can participate as long as they have some adult supervision. This would be a fun family project or something to do on a rainy day.
New projects are started often and periodically I receive an email with an invitation to join them. Here are the projects and their links that I received in my last email.
PollinatorWatch
Despite being small, pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, play a very important role in our lives! For example, did you know, that pollinators are necessary for the production of more than a third of all food crops world wide?
At PollinatorWatch you can help us uncover the ecological role of pollinators by searching for bees and other insects in time-lapse images. With your help, we hope to better understand why pollinator populations are declining and how that might be connected to climate change.
Zwicky Chemical Factory
Help us classify stellar explosions so we can understand how elements are created in the Universe.
...In this project you will be presented supernova spectra along with five potential matches, and we ask that you identify the best match.
SPACE FLUFF
Help uncover the mysteries of the fluffy universe!
Space Fluff needs your help: the project aims to classify and study the population of faint objects (or Fluffy Faints) in the Fornax cluster. This will bring us to a better understanding of Fornax, of the physics behind these puzzling and shy objects, and to some more accurate indirect measurements of dark matter. Moreover, you can be lucky and find something we did not expect to see! This is a new field and it is still full of surprises.
These objects are the dimmest we can observe, and their number will grow with bigger and future surveys. With Space Fluff, we will be ready for them!
Dolphin Chat
Ever since the times of Ancient Greeks, humans have been wondering if dolphins have “language” or at least some sort of sophisticated communication system. The Dolphin Chat project will bring us a little closer to better understanding what information dolphins’ calls possibly convey. Additionally, deep learning models allow us to process a lot of data, something that has not been possible up until relatively recently. Accurate identification of dolphin sounds will allow better performing passive acoustic investigations as we will be able to identify if dolphins are visiting certain areas based on their acoustic signals alone.
Whale Chat
The current development of deep learning and artificial intelligence allows a new approach to trying to understand whale songs. Deep learning models could help with identification of humpback sounds and unsupervised learning models could help to classify the song “units” in different ways. The Whale Chat project aims to investigate humpback songs from different years and regions, to identify humpback whale sounds in recordings, to classify these calls or units, and eventually to see if we can find individually distinct calls or units....If it is possible to identify individually distinct calls, then this information could be used to track migrating whales acoustically, helping to get valuable information about humpback whale populations and their health.
These are only a small sample of what citizen scientists can do to help solve riddles and compile information. Who knows, maybe more participation will help turn the tide on the anti-science sentiment we see in the world today.