- Citizen science (also known as crowd science, crowd-sourced science,civic science, or networked science) is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional scientists, often by crowdsourcing and crowd funding.
- Formally, citizen science has been defined as “the systematic collection and analysis of data; development of technology; testing of natural phenomena; and the dissemination of these activities by researchers on a primarily avocational basis”. It is sometimes called public participation in scientific research.
- Citizen Scientists have helped to answer serious scientific questions, provide vital data to the astronomical community, and have discovered thousands of objects including nebulas,supernovas, and gamma ray bursts. NASA supports several resources which may be of interest to amateur and professional scientists alike.
- Each day, bird watchers report tens of thousands of bird observations to citizen-science projects at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, contributing to the world’s most dynamic and powerful source of information on birds.