Also known as community/civic science, crowd-sourced science, and volunteer monitoring, citizen science is defined as “scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions.” Through citizen science, people share and contribute to data monitoring and collection programs. While data sharing can be through traditional methods such as counting wildlife or recording temperature, citizen science can also include offering downtime on one’s computer to automatically run algorithms or playing games to help solve research questions. Participants can also vary, from elementary school kids to amateur astronomers with sophisticated home equipment.

In this webinar, speakers from around the world will discuss their work, from astronomy to zoology. Chris Lintott, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, runs citizen science projects via the science web portal Zooniverse, in which over one million people help investigate galaxy formation and discover planets. Murdoch University marine scientist Brad Norman uses whale shark identification technology adapted from NASA’s Hubble Telescope to study the whale shark population around the world and help protect the species. Finally, Yousef Bohadi, a graduate student at the University of Iceland, Reykjavik, studies humpback dolphins in Kuwait and works with the public to develop a photo ID catalog.

In this webinar, viewers will:

• Learn about the benefits and limitations of citizen science
• Find out what ethical issues arise when engaging the public in research (e.g., intellectual property, data sharing) and how these issues are being addressed
• Discover how to participate in citizen science programs.

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