Photograph by Kelly Thayer, MyShot
Did you know snapping mountain-top photos of smog and listening for frog calls can help scientists? Get ideas for how you can participate in citizen science—projects in which volunteers and scientists work together to answer real-world questions and gather data.
More Ideas Like This
Observe Wildlife Anywhere
Photograph plants, animals, and other organisms. Use the iNaturalist app or iNaturalist.org to upload your observations and add them to a global database of biodiversity to support local to global research projects.
Measure Night-Sky Brightness
Join the Globe at Night program in documenting light pollution by submitting data based on the visibility of constellations.
Search Space
Want a chance to have an interstellar dust particle named after you? Help NASA by volunteering for Stardust@home and searching images for tiny interstellar dust impacts.
World Monitoring Day
Celebrate World Water Monitoring Day. Use a test kit to sample local bodies of water for water quality data and share the results with other communities around the world.
Bird Census
Join the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count and contribute to a wildlife census that will help scientists assess the health of bird populations.
Bird Watch
Join eBird, an online checklist project created by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society. Ebird allows people to report real-time bird sightings and observations.
Monitor Bird Nests
Join NestWatch, a continent-wide project to monitor bird nests. The project was started by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.
Count Birds
Participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count, an annual event that gets bird watchers to count birds across the continent and then tallies the highest number of birds of each species seen together at one time.
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Writer
Christina Riska Simmons
Editor
Jessica Shea, National Geographic Society
Photo Researcher
Livia Mazur, National Geographic Society
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