Citizen Science

As a global biodiversity hotspot, California has an immense array of nature to explore. We've compiled a few resources to guide folks in learning more about the nature around them, while contributing valuable data that can be used to answer important local conservation questions.
Help celebrate California's biodiversity and help inform the state's 30x30 initiative by taking a closer look at nearby nature and documenting your finds on iNaturalist! Explore the nature around you however you choose, whether that's visiting the coast, enjoying a long hike, walking to a nearby park, observing the birds outside your window, or looking for spiders under your couch.

Cities around the world collaborate to share observations of nature in the 2024 City Nature Challenge.

For two weeks every year, the California Academy of Sciences—with support from the California Ocean Protection Council, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the MPA (Marine Protected Area) Collaborative Network, and many other partners—mobilizes communities from Del Norte to San Diego to make and share observations of plants, animals, and seaweeds along the California coast using the iNaturalist app. By creating a real-time, statewide snapshot of current species ranges, we're building a community of observers that provides valuable data for scientists at local, regional, and state levels, and answering targeted research questions in support of California Marine Protected Areas.

Through three pathways—biodiversity science, environmental learning, and collaborative engagement—we will investigate the past, monitor the present, and create a future where healthy, resilient human and natural communities thrive together.

Discover the Sun's most extreme cosmic neighbors. Together we can discover new nearby cool neighbors of the Sun, known as brown dwarfs. Through the use of telescope data and the human brain’s ability to distinguish patterns with relative ease, we can identify real brown dwarfs hidden among other stars, galaxies, and detector noise. Brown dwarfs are celestial objects with masses in between those of stars and those of giant planets like Jupiter. You can think of them like oversized versions of Jupiter, but floating around all alone in interstellar space. These intriguing celestial objects are so dim that we need your help to spot them! Join our quest to reveal the Sun’s elusive cosmic neighbors using infrared images taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope. Your discoveries may even get observed by the James Webb Space Telescope!

Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project that invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. Each of the systems, containing billions of stars, has had a unique life, interacting with its surroundings and with other galaxies in many different ways. The aim of the Galaxy Zoo team is to try and understand these processes, and to work out what galaxies can tell us about the past, present and future of the Universe as a whole.

Monitor Galapagos marine iguanas using aerial images. Identify and count marine iguanas from drone images. The Galapagos marine iguana is an emblematic species of the Galapagos Archipelago. Naturally it only occurs in these islands. Unfortunately, it is endangered with extinction because of increasing anthropogenic threats and a complete survey studying its population size is not available because of the difficulty that reaching many of its colonies represent. Obtaining this information is critical to improve conservation management of the species. In this project, started on 2020, we are using developing technology to access all marine iguana colonies. By taking aerial images of the coastline, using drones launched from boats, we are finally capable of covering the entire known distribution range of this species but also have found new colonies. This new approach will help us to estimate the population size of the marine iguanas in a short time but also collect data on co-habiting species and plastic objects sharing the space that can be analyzed by other researchers and local managers. Since covering a large area with aerial imagery represents collecting tons of data, we have developed a citizen science project to speed up the analysis. So far we have found that volunteers can identify iguanas accurately but also develop a special interest regarding conservation in this iconic Archipelago. The largest citizen science platform Zooniverse.org hosts our project and we have obtained more than 9000 volunteers participating with us. Currently, a third phase is active which includes islands from the North and we expect to get more people involved each time. Join us!

The Neureka Project is run by researchers from the Gillan Lab at the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) in Trinity College Dublin. The project combines mobile technology with citizen science to help create a clearer picture of what keeps the brain healthy. The Neureka App asks members of the public to participate in neuroscience research at home, by playing games and tracking their mood and behaviour over time. With thousands of people already involved, this ‘big data’ helps researchers figure out new ways of keeping mental health problems at bay, and promoting resilience to late life cognitive decline. In the longer term, we hope to use data from neureka to screen for individuals at risk of developing mental health disorders or dementia.

The Stall Catchers project is designed by researchers at Cornell University to advance Alzheimer’s solutions. This project focuses on one aspect of the disease: reduced blood flow in the brain. This symptom of Alzheimer’s has been known about for years, but, until now, nobody knew why reduced blood flow happens in the brain. Researchers are now finding a connection between blood flow and memory. We need your help for researchers to understand this relationship further. You can help by playing a simple game: view short videos from the brains of mice and “catch” stalls. We will teach you how to score blood vessels as “flowing” or “stalled." Even the most powerful computer technologies can’t do this accurately enough yet, but your keen eyes can help us process decades worth of data. Your participation can help us fully understand how stalls are contributing to Alzheimer’s and discover potential treatment targets.

Be one of 30,000 participants in our NIH funded study collecting data on how different people respond to different types of memory training! The study involves playing a working memory training program, completing a few cognitive tests and filling out some questionnaires. There are 22 sessions and each session takes approximately 20 minutes to complete. The 22 sessions do not need to be completed in one sitting and you will receive affiliate credit on your SciStarter dashboard for each session you complete. Also note that you must use the same device (phone/tablet) for all sessions. All sessions can be completed at home on your own tablet or smartphone, and we ask you to do so in a quiet environment. We ask that you complete 2 sessions a day and to complete at least 10 sessions a week. The main study can be completed in 11 business days! Then you will be reminded to complete a short follow-up session 3 months later. Upon completion of the study, you will be entered into a monthly Grand Prize drawing for a chance to win a brand new iPad (10.2 Retina display with 32 GB of storage) or a gift card valued $20-100. You will also earn entries into a weekly give-away for a chance to win $5 or $10 gift cards. Entries are given for each completed session and these will be confirmed in weekly e-mails. Odds of winning depend upon the number of eligible entries. The giveaway is only open to legal residents of the United States.