Citizen Science projects
Citizen Science projects can range in scope from many people working across many areas to a few people focused on one small thing. Before joining a project make sure to read through contributor guidelines carefully, most Citizen Science projects put effort into helping contributors be empowered Citizen Scientists. Always make sure to reflect on the level of commitment you are able or willing to take on and whether you are comfortable with the data privacy policy of a given project.
If you are creating accounts on many different tools or downloading unknown apps, please consider the following best practices to protect your identity and minimise your risk. Take a look at these articles from Mozilla on staying safe on the web and protecting your identity online.
An incomplete list of projects to explore
The projects below showcase the diversity of Citizen Science projects.
“A citizen science project on human biological and chronological age.”
B.C. Cetacean Sightings Network
- Upcoming local events https://wildwhales.org/upcoming-events/
Report sightings of whales, dolphins, porpoises, and sea turtles in the waters of B.C. to help large ships minimise the risk of striking or disturbing them.
The BC Annual Bat Count is a citizen science program to annually monitor bat populations in roost sites.
Birdwatching with purpose. “Your sightings contribute to hundreds of conservation decisions and peer-reviewed papers, thousands of student projects, and help inform bird research worldwide.”
Bird-window collision : a problem at UBC buildings
A UBC-based project to monitor birds impacting windows on campus. Read more about it!
Help the eButterfly understand when and where butterflies occur.
This project is training an Artificial Intelligence (AI) to autonomously spot features in developing the developing embryos of aquatic creatures to better understand the impact of climate change on these creatures. Help the research team identify features of interest in scientific images to train the AI.
“Filling Fisheries Data Gaps with Historical Dock Photos.”
“Count cells of modern & fossil leaves. Help us track climate change over millions of years”
Have fun monitoring the natural world around you while contributing data about frogs and their habitats to researchers.
“Help scientists at LIGO() search for gravitational waves, the elusive ripples of spacetime”
Help scientists better understand the impact of climate change on forest ecosystems by transcribing historical climate data.
“Idenitfy the birds you see or hear with Merlin Bird ID”
Transcribe millions of pages of old ship’s logbooks to help build large datasets of climate information for use in research.
- One of the oldest continuous projects on Zooniverse (started in 2010!)
“Count penguins in remote regions to help us understand their lives and environment.”
“Reef Life Survey is a non-profit citizen science program in which trained SCUBA divers undertake standardised underwater visual surveys of reef biodiversity on rocky and coral reefs around the world.”
One of the earliest Citizen Science projects to leverage wide availability of personal computers was “SETI@home”. SETI stands for the “Search for Extra Terrestrial Life” and asked citizen scientists to download software that would make use of their internet-connected computers while they were not in use to scan the skies for signs of alien life. This project is currently in hibernation.
“…a citizen science project that aims to raise the public profile of science and radio astronomy while simultaneously creating a research grade data processing resource for scientists.”
Classify images of snowflakes to help scientists better track the impacts of climate change.
- Currently not accepting contributions because they ran out of data.
The UBC Seed Lending Library allows anyone to “borrow” seeds free of charge, and provides opportunities to learn about gardening, seed saving, and agricultural research and teaching at UBC.
Finding more projects
We have only scratched the surface of Citizen Science and there are many more projects to explore and get involved with.
- International:
- Canada:
- US: