Communication in Citizen Science projects is a significant factor in your project's success. There are many ways to connect with the participants in a project, one of them is rewarding users when they contribute.

Are you a SPOTTERON Partner who wishes to engage with Citizen Scientists on the Plattform more directly?
Do you have questions about a specific project or SPOTTERON in general that you want to ask quickly or any issues to report, but you don’t like to send an e-mail?
Search no more; we’ve got you covered!

We are excited to present you the latest web app on the SPOTTERON Citizen Science platform today: The Fossilfinder is the new tool for hobby and professional paleontologists to document fossil finds throughout Austria and beyond.

As a project partner on the SPOTTERON platform, you can now gently guide the Citizen Scientists contributing to your project to make better, more accurate observations in the Apps, thus making the data you're trying to obtain better and easier to manage.

The MAKENYA - Mammal Atlas Kenya project is a Kenyan Citizen Science App to monitor rare and common mammals. Together with scientists of the Zoology Department of Kenya's National Museums, we developed and designed the first mobile Application for an African country running on the SPOTTERON Platform.

We're delighted to announce that the Spot-A-Bee Citizen Science app is now available to Welsh speakers! The project aims to determine which plants, flowers, and trees in cities and urban areas benefit our most popular pollinators: the bees.

I am a Citizen Scientist. I have been one since I was eight years old, albeit without ever hearing the term even once. I was interested in nature, the environment, and I spent hours after hours exploring the wildlife in ponds, my parents' garden, forests, and even brown land. (Oh, I love brown land, I still sneak through construction fences to explore them sometimes :)

Starting the new year with some good news: The new open-action book, "The Science of Citizen science "has been finally published by Springer and is now availableas a free book (Open Access) for download.
With over a hundred contributing authors from 24 countries, including us, the book is a culmination of the work of the COST (Cooperation in Science and Technology in Europe) Action, "Citizen Science to promote creativity, scientific literacy, and innovation throughout Europe ", COST Action CA15212.

This year was one of the most difficult ones for all of us, with the Corona Virus pandemic, lockdowns and social distancing. But nevertheless, 2020 also brought good things and amazing new Citizen Science projects on the SPOTTERON platform. We loved the exciting work tasks and the diverse project topics which we have been allowed to design and develop in this strange year.

We are delighted to hear that our partner’s, the University of Sydney’s, Big City Birds app is making a big impact in Australia, as a recent article in the Guardian Australia shows.
The Citizen Science app that allows city-dwellers to turn into scientists and track Australia’s urban birds runs on the SPOTTERON platform.

In many Citizen Science and community engagement projects, participants may be reluctant to enter any data that may be sensitive, either, e.g. because of contributing an endangered species or for not wanting to share the location of their private garden.

The Univerity of Sydney invites citizens to take part in their latest Citizen Science project, Big City Birds, running on the SPOTTERON platform. The project aims to find out more about the adaptability of certain bird species in cities and urban areas.

The finalist 2020 for the Eureka Prize for Innovation in Citizen Science Australia has been announced. Congratulations to Team Brush Turkey who are listed with the BrushTurkey app, which is running on the SPOTTERON platform!

The new call in the EU Horizon 2020 program aims for supporting and implementing a Green Deal. For projects participating in this call and searching for partners for Citizen Science Apps and participatory tools, we are happy to help!

Biodiversity apps are booming, so it is no surprise that even traditional newspapers are writing about it. We are therefore proud to report that our co-founder Philipp was interviewed by the prestigious Austrian newspaper "Der Standard" (print edition) on new technologies and nature apps.

On this year's ECSA Citizen Science conference, we have been invited to hold a workshop on technology and the practice of design for Citizen Science. Since the conference moved completely online (read more about our experiences here in the Blog), we filled the session together with Jessie L. Oliver, who shared her research on how to design fun citizen science tech to find a sneaky Australia bird species (i.e. Eastern bristlebirds). Citizen Science is used and what technology implementation means for Citizen Science Apps and interactive online tools. Thanks for inviting us to be part of that session!

From 6th to 10th of September, the European Citizen Science Conference ECSA 2020 took place in the virtual space. Since we have been designing and developing the SPOTTERON Citizen Science platform for apps and interactive toolkits since 2014 already, it was not our first conference on Citizen Science - at least for Philipp, who is quite a regular in terms of visiting conferences. But this year, things rarely have been normal, and so the virtual event of ECSA 2020 was something new to all of us. Here are some first impressions by 2 conference newbies and a regular:

From the 6th to 10th of September, the European Citizen Science Conference 2020 by ECSA will be held exclusively online in Trieste, Italy.