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Tools for Citizen Science

Citizen Science tools can range from the humble pencil to logging into complex super computers. Many projects ask you to do the legwork of a research assistant or a research in collecting or organising data.

Not all Citizen Science tools are dependent on digital infrastructure. A simple starter kit for conducting Citizen Science might include:

  • Camera
  • Binoculars
  • Something to take notes with
  • Sometimes: Measuring tools
  • Computer
  • Mobile device

However, the rise in public access to computing has increased the scale at which projects can collect information and the diversity of information collecting activities.

Data and Participant privacy. The data collected in Citizen Science projects is subsequently used in research and exposed. This can cause concerns in terms of participant privacy.

Citizen Science Platforms

Many projects have dedicated apps and platforms that were custom built for their use. Examples of this are eBird and eMammal but modern projects don’t need to go that far. There are now many platforms and communities of support for projects interested in leveraging Citizen Science.

Zooniverse - Zooniverse is a crowdsourcing platform used for many different kinds of research projects and not limited to science. There are a number of notable citizen science projects that use this platform and many are interdisciplinary!

Pybossa - Pybossa is a crowdsourcing framework for processing and analyzing data which means that it is a set of tools that help researchers accomplish organising tasks through crowdsourcing.

CitSci.org - CitSci is a tool for data collection, visualization, and review which shows results in real time.

NatureWatch - A website that serves as a data collection platform for citizen scientists, launched as a partnership between Environment Canada, Nature Canada (and environmental NGO), and several other organisations.

Citizen Science Project Builder - Citizen Science Project Builder is a tool for structuring Citizen Science projects from data entry to visualization of results in real time.

Wikimedia Foundation projects - The Wikimedia foundation runs a number of crowdsourcing tools and makes available tools for running your own projects off of similar infrastructure. A noteable tool is Wikibase

Explore other digital tools for citizen science on the Citizen Science Awesome List.