Citizen Science Resources

Phylo

• Phylo is a game in which participants align sequences of DNA by shifting and moving puzzle pieces. Your score depends on how you arrange these pieces. You will be competing against a computer and other players in the community. All alignments contain sections of human DNA, which have been speculated to be linked to various genetic disorders, such as breast cancer. Every alignment is received, analyzed, and stored in a database, where it will eventually be reintroduced into the global alignment as an optimization. 

GLOBE Observer: Trees

• Healthy forests play a crucial role in Earth’s ecosystem as growing trees take up carbon from the atmosphere. GLOBE Observer is an app that allows citizen scientists to help investigate forest health by using their smartphone to measure tree height. With this tool, observers record tree height by tilting their phone up and down to align the screen with the tree’s top branch and base, and pace off the distance to the tree. The app does the rest to calculate the tree’s height. 

From Debris to Art: 

• Debris, trash, litter, discarded resources… Whatever you call it, it’s everywhere, and we all create it. But what if there were a way to creatively reexamine our relationship with debris? There is! The MDI Biological Laboratory is teaming up with eco-artist Mariah Reading to explore how trash can be turned into art and used to raise awareness of the impact of debris in our local environments. 

Steelpan Vibrations: 

• Researchers are trying to better understand the unique physics of the steelpan—also known as the steel drum. They're asking volunteers to locate areas of maximum vibrations (called antinodes) in images and to count concentric circles or ellipses.

iNaturalist:

• iNaturalist is a crowdsourced species identification system you can use to record your own observations, get help with identifications, collaborate with others to collect this kind of information for a common purpose, or access the observational data collected by iNaturalist users. Bird-watchers can collect helpful data for scientists and learn more about the birds they observe.

Nature's Notebook: 

• This project asks you to observe and share seasonal changes in plants and animals. Observing life cycles of plants and animals with Nature’s Notebook is easy and fun, and you will discover so much more about the plants and animals you see everyday.

Globe at Night: 

• This is a great project for stargazers, as it asks you to measure the night sky brightness. With Globe at Night, citizen scientists match the appearance of a constellation they see with seven star maps of progressively fainter stars. They then submit their choice of star map online with their date, time, and location to help create a worldwide light pollution map.

Stall Catchers

• Alzheimer's Research