A Comprehensive Site to Search for Citizen Science Projects

•

Review of SciStarter, Citizen Science Project Searchable WebsiteScreenshot_1

It's not often that I come across well organized and useful sites that pulls together science resources globally and locally, but SciStarter (http://scistarter.com/) is one. For me, this is a five star website.  Scistarter has been featured in Discover Magazine, NPR, WIRED, and BBC. On it's face it looks very simple, a searchable site for citizen science projects to get involved with.

The website is quite extensive, so they make it easy to search by where you'd like to become involved with citizen science, this is the "Pick an Activity" drop down menu (home, school, on a walk or run, hiking, at an aquarium, at sports stadiums, etc.). On the project finder page you can also search by state or region.

If you'd rather search by a field of interest they have a second drop down menu of "Topics." These include physics, biology, birds, sound, transportation, ocean and water, ecology, food, health and medicine, insects, and more.

Screenshot_3

When you click on a a field of interest or activity you're taken to a nice menu of photos and short descriptions of activities. Each link will lead you to more information and the website of the organization. The interesting thing about this site is that it has global and local projects. You can find shark observation projects, bird watching projects, activities to do at home that are crowd sourcing such as seal counting under arctic ice, assembling DNA fragments, mapping brain paths, and  mapping the human microbe biomes. There's a lot to this site and it will keep you busy!

If you like you can also join SciStarter's e-Newsletter or online blog (http://scistarter.com/blog/) for new projects and events.

Visit this link http://scistarter.com/blog/2013/11/thought-experiment-rock-vomit/ to see my guest blog post about the new Smithsonian Environmental Research Center "Thought Project" citizen science.