#i identify most bees posted to the northeastern US on iNat and well. i'm an active birder lol

[asgardian--angels]

Conservation biologist here! Citizen science is super important!

You might wonder if submitting a couple photos of bugs in your yard to iNaturalist or feeder birds to eBird make a difference and it DOES. There are hundreds of academic papers each year (including my own) that use data from these citizen science projects to track long term trends in species populations, discover new populations of rare or imperiled species, or understand animal behavior and species interactions. Once in a while, someone even rediscovers a once-thought-extinct species by chance!

Citizen science is important because, as I've mentioned before, there aren't enough biologists to go around. We can't survey species everywhere, so a lot of places end up with big data gaps, particularly rural areas. Your backyard could have species that we didn't even know occurred in that county, or even that state! We need you to help fill in those gaps - even if you don't know what you're taking a picture of, if you put it on a community-driven platform like iNaturalist, we will ID it for you.

Citizen science can be a gateway into conservation, getting you more familiar and curious about the nature in your area. You'll start noticing more, knowing their names, and then seeking them out. Before you know it, you'll also be looking for a community of like-minded enthusiasts, meeting up to look for things together, or participating in events to help build habitat, or even help teach others what you've learned.

Some of the sites listed and bullet pointed above are redundant, so let me summarize:

Zooniverse as mentioned is an excellent place to find a variety of projects that need pairs of eyes to look through data, as others have mentioned. There's trail cam projects, whale song projects, star map projects, transcription projects, any number of things you can do at home (and not just science, quite a lot of humanities and history stuff on there too). It can be super relaxing to just spend a few hours going through photos and clicking buttons.

iNaturalist is the major worldwide platform for submitting photos or audio of literally any living thing, anywhere. It's community-based, so you suggest an ID, and others will agree or correct it until it's reached a consensus and can be 'research grade', aka enough for scientists to use. The possibilities of how you can search, view, and study the data are limitless. Learn the species in your area, search for where to find species you want to see, learn who else near you is interested in the same kinds of organisms, you name it. And if you already are pretty good at IDing some kind of organism, you can help add IDs to others' posts and pay it forward.

eBird is, next to iNaturalist, the other largest global citizen science platform, but only for birds. It is made by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which also makes the Merlin bird ID app and AllAboutBirds website. Out of those three, eBird is the actual citizen science site you submit to. eBird is the primary platform used by birders of all skill levels, and contains over 101,000,000 checklists from birders all over the globe. Like, if you were wondering where birders hang out, it's here. You could search the data for hours. Birders do. It doesn't matter if you submit a single chickadee or a 12-hour Big Day list, they all count and they're all important. There is a higher expectation of data quality here though than places like iNaturalist - you do need to be sure of what species you are seeing, and if you try to submit something rare without documentation they will contact you.

There are smaller eBird projects you can do coming into the winter now though - check out Project Feederwatch, The Great Backyard Bird Count, and the annual Christmas Bird Count, which happens in several locations in every state each year! These pertain to common, easy-to-ID yard birds and there are resources to help you learn them.

These sites all have tutorials on how to use them!

There are so many citizen science projects. Some like bioblitzes are in-person events that usually last one day and take place at a specific property like a local nature preserve, while others like a butterfly census occur all season and you can sign up for a route. Look into what's happening in your state by checking out your local Audubon chapter's website!

I'll throw a few others here: BugGuide, BumbleBee Watch, Beecology, The Great Sunflower Project, Xeno-Canto, Big Bee

If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

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I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.