Citizen science asks everyday volunteers to make observations of the world around them and add data to research projects that scientists use to answer big questions. When you make citizen science observations, you might enter the information into an app, take a photo or answer a few questions in an online form and hit submit. That might be the end of your part of the process, but submitting a data point is just the first step in the long, rigorous journey from observation to scientific conclusions.
Along the way, your data will join hundreds or thousands of other observations in datasets that researchers use to answer big questions about our world, like “Why are all the trees blooming earlier every year?” or “How can we fight Alzheimer’s Disease?” Sometimes, depending on the project, you may even help analyze the data.
The process of getting scientific data into real-word answers takes ...
