Zooniverse (citizen science project)

Zooniverse

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Web address	www.zooniverse.org
Slogan	Real science online
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Citizen science web portal
Registration	Optional
Available in	English, German, Polish
Owner	Citizen Science Alliance
Created by	Fingerprint Digital Media
Launched	12 December 2009 (2009-12-12)
Current status	Online

Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance. It is home to the internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The organization grew from the original Galaxy Zoo project and now hosts dozens of projects which allow volunteers to participate in crowdsourced scientific research. It has headquarters at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium. Unlike many early internet-based citizen science projects (such as SETI@home) which used spare computer processing power to analyse data, known as volunteer computing, Zooniverse projects require the active participation of human volunteers to complete research tasks. Projects have been drawn from disciplines including astronomy, ecology, cell biology, humanities, and climate science.

As of 14 February 2014, the Zooniverse community consisted of more than 1 million registered volunteers. The volunteers are often collectively referred to as "Zooites". The data collected from the various projects has led to the publication of more than 70 scientific papers. A daily news website called 'The Daily Zooniverse' provides information on the different projects under the Zooniverse umbrella, and has a presence on social media.

Citizen Science Alliance

The Zooniverse is hosted by the Citizen Science Alliance, which is governed by a board of directors from seven institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States. The partners are the Adler Planetarium, Johns Hopkins University, University of Minnesota, National Maritime Museum, University of Nottingham, Oxford University and Vizzuality.

Projects

Space projects

Logo	Project	Type	Description	Launch date	End date
100px	Galaxy Zoo	Decision tree	The fourth and latest incarnation of the Galaxy Zoo project, in which users are shown images of a galaxy and then asked a series of questions to classify its morphology. The current sample includes images of high-redshift galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and low-redshift galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico.	12 Jul 2007	—	[1]
100px	Moon Zoo	Annotation	High-resolution images of the Moon's surface provided by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are used by volunteers to create detailed crater counts, mapping the variation in age of lunar rocks.	16 Feb 2009	—	[2]
100px	Solar Stormwatch	Annotation	The project uses data including video imagery from the twin STEREO spacecraft to track the formation and evolution of coronal mass ejections.	21 Dec 2009	—	[3]
100px	The Milky Way Project	Annotation	Detecting bubbles in the interstellar medium which indicate regions where the early stages of star formation are taking place. The project uses infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as sub-millimetre data from Herschel.	7 Dec 2010	—	[4]
100px	Planet Hunters	Annotation	Identifying extrasolar planets from the light curves of stars recorded by the Kepler space telescope.	16 Dec 2010	—	[5]
100px	Planet Four	Annotation	Analyze images of the surface of Mars, taken near the Martian southern polar cap. Classifications include marking fans and blotches caused by sublimating gas and geysers underneath the carbon dioxide ice. Images come from the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.	8 Jan 2013	—	[6]
100px	Radio Galaxy Zoo	Annotation	Identify radio-wavelength images of astrophysical jets in galaxies that are powered by accretion onto a black hole. The task is to correctly associate any radio components with an infrared image of the black hole's host galaxy.	17 Dec 2013	—	[7]
	Disk Detective	Filtering	Identify dusty debris disks in the Milky Way galaxy that indicate stars in the process of forming planetary systems. Images come from NASA's WISE telescope, as well as the DSS2 and 2MASS surveys.	30 Jan 2014	—	[8]
100px	Sunspotter	Ranking	Examine images of sunspots and rank pairs of images according to their relative complexity. The science goal is to examine how the complexity of sunspots evolves over time and how they produce eruptions. Data for the project comes from the Michelson Doppler Instrument aboard the SOHO spacecraft.	27 Feb 2014	—	[9]
100px	Asteroid Zoo	Annotation	Examine sets of time-lapsed images to search for moving objects that could be undiscovered asteroids. Data comes from the Catalina Sky Survey telescopes in Arizona. The project is run in conjunction with Planetary Resources, which is focused on developing technology for asteroid mining.	24 Jun 2014	—	[10]
	Galaxy Zoo: Bar Lengths	Annotation	Identify and measure the bars in spiral galaxies from 8,000 images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.	1 July 2015	—	[11]
	Planet Four: Terrains	Filtering	Analyze images of the surface of Mars, taken by the low resolution Context camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to identify future targets for the spacecraft's higher resolution HiRISE camera to investigate.	1 July 2015	—	[12]

Nature & climate projects

Logo	Project	Type	Description	Launch date	End date
100px	Old Weather	Transcription	Zooites use a special interface to digitally transcribe weather and sea ice data from the log books of United States Arctic exploration and research ships, that were at sea between 1850 and 1950. The current data is the third phase of the project.	12 Oct 2010	—	[13]
	Cyclone Center	Decision tree	Classifying tropical cyclones by using a modified version of the Dvorak Technique. Volunteers are shown a series of images from infrared sensors on weather satellites and asked a number of questions to identify the type and strength of the storm.	27 Sep 2012	—	[14]
100px	Bat Detective	Pattern matching	Monitor the status of bat populations by classifying the sounds they make for echolocation and social purposes. The data are originally recorded using ultrasonic microphones; calls are played back at a slower speed within the range of human hearing; data are also shown visually in the form of a spectrogram.	1 Oct 2012	—	[15]
100px	Snapshot Serengeti	Filtering	Classifying animals at the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania using images gathered from 225 camera traps. The purpose is to study how species are distributed across the landscape and interact with each other.	11 Dec 2012	—	[16]
100px	Notes from Nature	Transcription	Transcribing museum records to obtain historical biodiversity data.	22 Apr 2013	—	[17]
100px	Plankton Portal	Filtering	Classifying plankton from images gathered by the In Situ Ichthyoplankton Imaging System to understand how plankton types are distributed at a variety of ocean depths. The information can be used to map oceanic carbon dioxide levels, as plankton provide a valid indicator.	27 Sep 2013	—	[18]
	Condor Watch	Annotation	Examine motion-capture images from Pinnacles National Park in northern California. Volunteers identify California condors and mark the distance to feeding sources such as animal carcasses.	15 Apr 2014	—	[19]
100px	Floating Forests	Annotation	Volunteers look at satellite images to search for large masses of giant kelp in coastal ocean environments.	8 Aug 2014	—	[20]
100px	Chicago Wildlife Watch	Annotation	Volunteers assist Lincoln Park Zoo to review millions of motion sensor images to identify and study wild animals in the urban environment.	11 Sep 2014	—	[21]
	Penguin Watch	Annotation	Remote camera images of areas in the Southern Ocean and Antarctic Peninsula are tagged for detections of penguins of various species. Scientists aim to measure changes in the timing of penguin breeding, nest survival rates, the rates of predation on penguin chicks, and determining where colonies overwinter at breeding sites.	17 Sep 2014	—	[22]
	Chimp & See	Annotation	By identifying individual Chimpanzees from videos and highlighting examples of tool use and other behaviour patterns help scientists, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, understand chimp culture, population size and demographics in specific regions of Africa.	22 April 2015	—	[23]
	Orchid Observers	Transcription	Photograph wild orchids throughout the summer of 2015 and/or annotate images and transcribe data from the orchid collection of the Natural History Museum, London.	23 Apr 2015	—	[24]
	Wildebeest Watch	Filtering	Interpret the movement of wildebeest in images from camera traps in the Serengeti National Park to help scientists better map their migration movements and to understand the collective intelligence of herds.	1 July 2015	—	[25]
	Whales as Individuals	Annotation	Mark details on photographs of whale flukes to identify individual animals and to help computers learn to do the same.	1 July 2015	—	[26]
	Wildcam Gorongosa	Annotation	Identify animals in trail camera photographs taken in the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique.	1 September 2015	—	[27]
	Fossil Finder	Annotation	Document surface images from fossil bearing landscapes in the Turkana Basin in northern Kenya to identify potential sites of fossils and stone tools for further investigation.	November 2015	—	[28]
	Jungle Rhythms	Transcription	Transcribe hand-drawn observations, made between 1937 and 1958, of life cycle events for over 2,000 trees in the tropical forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.	February 2016	—	[29]
	Western Shield - Camera Watch	Annotation	Examine camera trap images from western Australia to help the Western Shield project manage the impact of feral foxes and cats on the regions' native wildlife.	7 April 2016	—	[30]
	Snapshot Wisconsin (formerly, Wisconsin Wildlife Watch)	Annotation	Examine camera trap images from Wisconsin to identify animals and help scientists better understand trends in the distribution of wildlife populations in the state.	8 January 2016	—	[31][32]

Humanities projects

Logo	Project	Type	Description	Launch date	End date
100px	Ancient Lives	Transcription	Transcribing texts in Greek from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The papyri belong to the Egypt Exploration Society and their texts will eventually be published and numbered in Society's Greco-Roman Memoirs series.	26 Jul 2011	—	[33]
100px	Operation War Diary	Transcription	Transcribe British war diaries from World War I, helping historians to track troop movements, add to catalogue metadata, and delve into individual experiences of soldiers.	14 Jan 2014	—	[34]
	Science Gossip	Annotation	Classify illustrations from the pages of early science journals and periodicals digitized by the Biodiversity Heritage Library.	2015	—	[35]
	Emigrant City	Transcription	Explore the history of New York City by transcribing mortgage and bond ledgers of the Emigrant Savings Bank from between 1851 and 1921, held by the New York Public Library.	1 December 2015	—	[36]
	Measuring the ANZACs	Transcription	Transcribe documents to help create a comprehensive database of New Zealand war history, comprising the names, jobs, birthplaces and health at enlistment of Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the New Zealand Army during World War One.	14 August 2015	—	[37]

Biology & physics projects

Logo	Project	Type	Description	Launch date	End date
	Cell Slider	Annotation	Using images from Cancer Research UK volunteers help to classify archived cancer samples.	24 Oct 2012	—	[38]
100px	Worm Watch Lab	Annotation	Watch videos of nematode worms to collect genetic data that will assist medical research. The classifications offer data to researchers on brain and gene function. The nematode species studied is Caenorhabditis elegans.	3 Jul 2013	—	[39]
	Higgs Hunters	Annotation	Uncover the building blocks of the universe. Help search for unknown exotic particles in the Large Hadron Collider data.	26 Nov 2014	—	[40]

Retired projects

Logo	Project	Type	Description	Launch date	End date
	Galaxy Zoo Mergers	Pattern matching	Compared images of galaxies discovered by the original Galaxy Zoo to simulations to study the dynamics of interacting galaxies.	23 Nov 2009	25 Jun 2012
	Galaxy Zoo Supernovae	Annotation	Used data from the Palomar Transient Factory survey to search for supernovae for quick follow-up study by telescopes around the world.	13 Aug 2009	3 Aug 2012
	Ice Hunters	Annotation	Identified Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) for potential future targets for the New Horizons spacecraft. Also identified variable stars and asteroids. It made use of human review of subtracted images from various telescopes.	21 Jun 2011	early 2012
100px	Old Weather Phases One & Two	Transcription	Between October 2010 and July 2012, some 16,400 volunteers transcribed the weather data from 1,090,745 pages of the log books of World War 1 era Royal Navy ships. The project generated 1.6 million weather observations that will be used to improve climate modelling.	12 Oct 2010	23 Jul 2012
100px	Andromeda Project	Annotation	Used images from the Hubble Space Telescope to identify star clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy as well as background distant galaxies hidden in the star fields.	5 Dec 2012	30 Oct 2013
100px	Space Warps	Annotation	Searched for gravitational lenses created by massive galaxies in distant space.	8 May 2013	2014
	Star Date: M83	Annotation	Described the shapes and colors of star clusters in the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy (M83) using images from the Hubble Space Telescope.	13 Jan 2014	2014
100px	Whale FM	Pattern matching	Categorized the sounds made by killer whales and followed the travels of individual animals around the oceans. Volunteers heard an audio clip of the whale sounds and viewed the data as a spectrogram. The project was run in conjunction with Scientific American.	29 Nov 2011
100px	Seafloor Explorer	Filtering	Identified species and ground cover in images of the seafloor to create a library of seafloor habitats. The images were from a robotic camera that mapped the seafloor off the coast of the northeastern United States.	13 Sep 2012
	SETILive	Annotation	SETILive was a project which attempted to use humans to identify potential signals from intelligent extraterrestrial life which may be missed by computer algorithms. The data came from radio observations by the Allen Telescope Array of stars in the Kepler field of view.	29 Feb 2012	12 Oct 2014

External links

• Citizen Science Alliance