---
title: "Citizen science"
chunk: 11/19
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:12:57.708518+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Not counting iNaturalist and eBird, the Zooniverse is home to the internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The Zooniverse and the suite of projects it contains is produced, maintained and developed by the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA). The member institutions of the CSA work with many academic and other partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them. On 29 June 2015, the Zooniverse released a new software version with a project-building tool allowing any registered user to create a project. Project owners may optionally complete an approval process to have their projects listed on the Zooniverse site and promoted to the Zooniverse community. A NASA/JPL picture to the right gives an example from one of Zooniverse's projects The Milky Way Project.
The website CosmoQuest has as its goal "To create a community of people bent on together advancing our understanding of the universe; a community of people who are participating in doing science, who can explain why what they do matters, and what questions they are helping to answer."
CrowdCrafting enables its participants to create and run projects where volunteers help with image classification, transcription, geocoding and more. The platform is powered by PyBossa software, a free and open-source framework for crowdsourcing.
Project Soothe is a citizen science research project based at the University of Edinburgh. The aim of this research is to create a bank of soothing images, submitted by members of the public, which can be used to help others through psychotherapy and research in the future. Since 2015, Project Soothe has received over 600 soothing photographs from people in 23 countries. Anyone aged 12 years or over is eligible to participate in this research in two ways: (1) By submitting soothing photos that they have taken with a description of why the images make them feel soothed (2) By rating the photos that have been submitted by people worldwide for their soothability.

The internet has allowed for many individuals to share and upload massive amounts of data. Using the internet citizen observatories have been designed as a platform to both increase citizen participation and knowledge of their surrounding environment by collecting whatever relevant data is focused by the program. The idea is making it easier and more exciting for citizens to get and stay involved in local data collection.
The invention of social media has aided in providing massive amounts of information from the public to create citizen science programs. In a case study by Andrea Liberatore, Erin Bowkett, Catriona J. MacLeod, Eric Spurr, and Nancy Longnecker, the New Zealand Garden Bird Survey is conducted as one such project with the aid of social media. It examines the influence of utilizing a Facebook group to collect data from citizen scientists as the researchers work on the project over the span of a year. The authors claim that this use of social media greatly helps with the efficiency of this study and makes the atmosphere feel more communal.

=== Smartphone ===
The bandwidth and ubiquity afforded by smartphones has vastly expanded the opportunities for citizen science. Examples include iNaturalist, Chronolog, the San Francisco project, Mosquito Alert, the WildLab, Project Noah, and Aurorasurus. Due to their ubiquity, for example, Twitter, Facebook, and smartphones have been useful for citizen scientists, having enabled them to discover and propagate a new type of aurora dubbed STEVE in 2016.
There are also apps for monitoring birds, marine wildlife and other organisms, and the "Loss of the Night". Chronolog, another citizen science initiative, uses smartphone photography to crowdsource environmental monitoring through timelapses. By positioning their cameras at designated photo stations and submitting images, participants contribute to long-term ecological records at parks and conservation sites across 48 U.S. states and 10 countries. Restoration professionals and other land stewards use this data to measure ecosystem health and understand the effectiveness of conservation interventions like habitat restoration, controlled burns, removal of invasive species, planting of native species, and efforts to improve water quality.
"The Crowd and the Cloud" is a four-part series broadcast during April 2017, which examines citizen science. It shows how smartphones, computers and mobile technology enable regular citizens to become part of a 21st-century way of doing science. The programs also demonstrate how citizen scientists help professional scientists to advance knowledge, which helps speed up new discoveries and innovations. The Crowd & The Cloud is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

=== Seismology ===
Since 1975, in order to improve earthquake detection and collect useful information, the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre monitors the visits of earthquake eyewitnesses to its website and relies on Facebook and Twitter. More recently, they developed the LastQuake mobile application which notifies users about earthquakes occurring around the world, alerts people when earthquakes hit near them, gathers citizen seismologists' testimonies to estimate the felt ground shaking and possible damages.

=== Hydrology ===
Citizen science has been used to provide valuable data in hydrology (catchment science), notably flood risk, water quality, and water resource management. A growth in internet use and smartphone ownership has allowed users to collect and share real-time flood-risk information using, for example, social media and web-based forms. Although traditional data collection methods are well-established, citizen science is being used to fill the data gaps on a local level, and is therefore meaningful to individual communities. Data collected from citizen science can also compare well to professionally collected data. It has been demonstrated that citizen science is particularly advantageous during a flash flood because the public are more likely to witness these rarer hydrological events than scientists.

=== Plastics and pollution ===