Crowd Contributions to Frontline Scientific Work
All over the world hundreds of thousands of volunteers are helping to push the boundaries of science via their home computers.
From mapping the largest objects in the Universe to studying the smallest living things inside our bodies the crowd is getting involved in a a large number of experiments.
Here is a list of some of the citizen science projects that have caught our attention:
Galaxy Zoo – mapping obscure corners of the Universe and classifying morphologies of galaxies.
Frogwatch – a monitoring program to increase knowledge of frogs and toads in Alberta, Canada. Tracking changes in populations can help determine causes of any declines, and feed into possible solutions.
Cosmoquest – mapping moon craters, asteroids, and investigating planets.
Hummingbirds at Home – track and report on the spring hummingbird migration. This is also possible via a free mobile app. Observations feed into conservation work.
uBiome – a huge effort to map the human microbiome, that is the microbes that live on and inside us. The project supplies volunteers with an easy-to-use swab kit so they can take swab samples from their bodies and send them back to the scientists for analysis.
Eyewire – a project developed by MIT. This online game helps scientists to identify specific cell types within the known broad classes of retinal cells. It is feeding into research that will give them a better understanding of how vision works.
“We still don’t know how many types of neurons there are in the retina,” Sebastian Seung, Professor of Neuroscience, MIT. “Moreover, we don’t really know which types are connected to which types.”
SubseaObservers – surveying the scallop population in the New York Bight, off the coasts of New York, New Jersey and Delaware. Volunteers analyze undersea images taken by a robot submarine and submit their observations. The work helps scallop fishermen and the management of the mid-Atlantic’s scallop population.
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