Citizen Science Project for Conservation Ecology Class and others

I was given an assignment to find and participate in a citizen science project for my Conservation Ecology Class at Virginia Tech. Citizen Science allows the general public to participate in work under direction of a larger scientific group. I was able to find several projects in my local area, but most of them needed volunteers for the spring and summer. Two of the local projects I have worked with before consisted of doing macro invertebrate studies, maintaining and recording data for bluebird boxes and also working on a bird census of migrating birds and also ground nesting birds. I looked on the internet for more projects and I was able to find several sites specifically for this purpose. The first site I chose to look at was Scistarter.org. This site allows you find a project by diferent search terms. I determined that I wanted to search by my location and projects that could be completed by an adult of college student. Another way to search for projects is for the type of project, whether it is hosted online, in a classroom, by app, by an affiliate or ones that are Federally funded. Topics are listed by categories including animals, climate, education, physics, social science, and many others. The time of day or length of time is another way to sort projects this helps you find projects based on the free time a volunteer might have.

I found several projects of interest but none that would be suitable for the class. Some are located to far to be able to reasonably do or were out of season. Changing bud time, bee counts, tracking ice and following migration of birds or butterflies all require a different season for volunteering.

Zooniverse.org is another search engine for citizen science projects. The projects are sorted based on project and not volunteer needed. You can search by discipline and then by most active, most popular, newest or project with the most help needed. This has interesting projects that can be done at home, I tried out a few and then went back to searching.

I remember hearing about iNaturalist doing work with a local conservation group and I looked into that a little more, this would be the project that I decided to participate in.