How anyone can be a Scientist

 

What is Citizen Science and why should I care?

Citizen science is a brand new area of scientific research that has only received proper acknowledgement in the last few decades, and it is an area in which everyone can get involved.

In particular, areas such as bird-watching (ornithology) or astronomy lend themselves to this form of work. This is both because the number of interested non-scientists far outweigh the number of scientists in these fields, and because the scientific method can be simple. The value of such research to generate big data is undeniable!

In a world where even academic research is often directed at only those projects that industry is willing to fund, it is essential that we still support the less economically viable work.

How can I be involved?

What a good question!

There are a massive amount of projects you can get involved in, and many of them are on the website Scistarter in the US, Countryside JobsCitizen Science or even on Wikipedia.

I have been involved with Sea Hero Quest, a game that aids Dementia research through assessing the spatial memory of players. This sort of data is valuable to determine a baseline for what goes wrong in Dementia. This is important because our scientific community is currently struggling to find an effective cure or even a treatment for Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and that is partially due to difficulties in early diagnosis.

If you happened to read my post from last week, you may be interested to know that there are also projects involving taking samples from volunteers. uBiome is a company that sequences Microbiome data from paying volunteers. This data could have a massive impact on our understanding of the Microbiome and its connections to human diseases.

Other projects can involve surveys, such as OPAL surveys to assess the state of our environment, bug surveys by Buglife to keep an eye on our insect populations, BirdTrack to give our airbourne friends some help, Treezilla, which is a project to record all of the country’s trees and the list goes on… I’ve just documented some of the nature-related surveys and projects in which I’ve taken part – there are hundreds of projects relating to pretty much any area of science!

 

A note from the author: As I sometimes write on emotive subjects, comments are disabled after 14 days. This is because ongoing discussions tend to stagnate.

References:

  1. BBC article on Citizen science
  2. The UK Environmental Observation Framework’s details on Citizen Science