Citizen Science
Not all scientific research is carried out by professionals. In citizen science projects, members of the public help researchers by data that would be impossible to gather otherwise. Every winter, for example, thousands of volunteers count the birds that visit their gardens and send the results to a national charity. Others through millions of telescope images online, looking for galaxies with unusual shapes. The benefits go in both directions. Scientists gain access to far more observations than any team could on its own, and volunteers often develop a lasting interest in the subject. Some professionals are about the quality of the data, since untrained participants may misidentify a species or miss something important. Most projects deal with this by asking several people to examine the same item and accepting only results on which they . Studies have found that, when checked in this way, data from volunteers can be as as that collected by experts.
