Citizen Science: Getting Involved
During the past few months, I have noticed a positive trend of people wanting to monitor their environmental impact and educate themselves on increasingly relevant topics, like plastic pollution and climate change. One great way anyone can do this is through citizen science projects.
Citizen science is having ordinary community members contribute data to a scientific study or experiment. It is "crowdsourcing" the research and data collection to the public in order to get real world information. Citizen science helps scientists collect a much larger and further-reaching amount of data than if they had to do it all themselves. These projects could be local, such as Florida Lakewatch, or global like the Globe Observer.
Getting involved with citizen science is beneficial because you get to be a vital part of a project that interests you and is important to you - and the results could have a significant impact to your community. Plus, anyone can do it: any age, any background. Just a willingness to contribute is necessary. There are so many different types of projects covering so many different topics. If you like birds, there's a project, if you like bats, there's something, even if you're interested in vitamin C, there's a project for you. I think you get the idea; citizen science projects are everywhere! My favorites are ones that track litter and plastic pollution, a problem that is thankfully gaining visibility.
Here are some great examples of citizen science projects:
Open Litter Map - Earn littercoin cryptocurrency!
Audubon EagleWatch - Monitor Florida bald eagles
This list contains just some of the few projects I have found. Make sure you search around for yourself to find something you'd really love to participate in!
One great resource for citizen science participation is Zooniverse, a platform dedicated to "people-powered research."
