Resources
Find a Project
Find Forest Service citizen science highlights on our Projects page or find projects from all federal agencies in the Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Catalog and interactive map.
SciStarter is the place to find, join, and contribute to science through recreational activities and citizen science research projects. This comprehensive, searchable database of citizen science projects enable discovery, organization, and greater participation in citizen science.
Citizen Science Central is a nationwide clearinghouse for all kinds of public-participation projects in a variety of topics, ranging from astronomy to zoology. Find a project you'd like to join, or register your research project and solicit citizen scientist volunteers.
EPA National Directory of Volunteer Monitoring Programs This directory lists volunteer organizations around the country engaged in monitoring rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, wetlands, and ground water, as well as surrounding lands.
Design a Project
Cornell Citizen Science Toolkit for designing new projects and supporting existing ones. Learn to choose a question, form a team, refine protocols, recruit and train participants, accept and analyze data, and more.
Citsci.org offers tools to support your citizen science project. Create projects, build datasheets, add data, and view results in real-time. These tools support the full spectrum of citizen science program needs from creating projects to getting feedback from volunteers for program evaluation.
Do it yourself BioBlitz - Learn from the organization that started it all. A how-to video and other resources are available on the National Geographic site. See Webinar Session X to explore how the Forest Service can utilize BioBlitz to identify biodiversity while connecting people to public lands.
ESRI Citizen Science Resources - To get the robust data sets needed, researchers increasingly look to citizens for contributions. With the prevalence of tablets and mobile devices, people across the globe can act as observers collecting information for important projects that expand scientific understanding. The technology highlighted here includes the Citizen Science Reporter, Citizen Science Manager and Story Maps. See Webinar Session X for an overview of the ArcGIS apps that are currently available to us for crowdsourcing and citizen science.
Anecdata.org is a free online platform where anyone can create an account to start crowdsourcing georeferenced environmental and ecological data, supporting anything from water quality data to full multidimensional species biodiversity surveys. Anecdata is being used for a wide range of projects, from water quality and red tide monitoring to snowpack surveys, King Tides photo collection, eelgrass mapping, and ocean acidification and softshell clam settlement surveys. They support bulk data uploads for legacy datasets and users can also generate custom data downloads across projects in ArcGIS, Google Earth, and Excel formats.
SciStarter Citizen Science Platforms Report This four-part report is the result of an investigation on developments in software, hardware and data processing capability for citizen science. The first part, Data Collection Platform Evaluation, examines existing online software platforms designed to support citizen science. The second, Technology Evaluation, describes recent technology related to sensors, data collection and data visualization. The last two parts include a set of user interface designs for a future citizen science data collection platform and the results of testing cloud computing platforms for geospatial data processing performance.