What is the best way for a Citizen Scientist to observe a specific plant, landscape, place, etc. over a more extended period of time and gather valuable data during its course?

Our world is subject to constant change.
It establishes itself by constant development and evolution, triggered by events like human activity, climate change, erosion, or simply the changing of the seasons, and many more. These changes in observational data are not just a side effect, but they're often the primary focus for scientists and the research project.

Green Growth Forests is another new app on the SPOTTERON citizen science platform and the first project from South America!

For Citizen Science projects, it is essential to understand the needs of the user and how to design interactive products and apps to guarantee good usability – which is highly involving. Researching and observing should be an experience with added value. Therefore User Journeys are often used in the progress of developing a new Application. 

Making complex information easy to understand not just to scientists but also to citizens is an art form, especially when it comes to describing things or places very few among us have ever seen or experienced: space.

KraMobil is a new Citizen Science Project of the University of Vienna in cooperation with ZooVienna to observe crows and their behaviour.

Spot-A-Bee, a new app by The University of Glasgow and the Cardiff University aims to find out which plants in urban areas are especially bee-friendly and help bee populations thrive.

Our Citizen Science partner "Konrad Lorenz Research Center", running the Citizen Science App "Forschen im Almtal" on the SPOTTERON Platform and initiator of "NestCams", our first collaboration with Zooniverse, started a great initiative. At their research station, they host a colony of Northern Bald Ibis, amazing birds which you can also observe in the "Forschen I'm Almtal" Citizen Science App.

On Saturday last week, I was on a walk outside to get a little bit of sunshine. But since Citizen Science became a significant thing in my life, these rounds are not only for stretching my legs. With the smartphone in my pocket and a bunch of Citizen Science Apps installed, every walk feels like an adventure.

Challenging times require creative solutions. The current corona crisis is a perfect example of that. That’s why we are excited to announce that the University of Edinburgh joined forces with SPOTTERON once more to create the CoronaReport Citizen Science app because understanding the social impact of COVID-19 on society is very important - not only for research but for society itself.

In today's fast and everchanging world, it can seem tedious to syphon through the haze of information to find the relevant one. A quick search on Google is undoubtedly a good thing, but what if you need the information to be verified as quickly, as possible?
Many users will turn to social media to do that. Why? Because on Twitter, you can find news in real-time. Without much effort, you can verify a piece of information in an instant.

Data quality and data management are essential aspects of Citizen Science. In order to always have a validated and stable data-set of user's contributions that can be managed directly in your Citizen Science app's administration interface present, we have created "Check & Lock".

When choosing a name for your Citizen Science app or a project, you're creating a public appearance. You want to make it stand out, and you want people to remember it. Here's a short guideline on how to best achieve precisely that.

It has been six years since we started the first apps on the SPOTTERON platform and what a journey this has been!

2019 has been an amazing year. The SPOTTERON Citizen Science platform evolved into an even more professional solution for participatory science applications. In summer, we organized the "SPOTTERON Feature Ecosystem" into various thematic packages for a better overview of what the platform brings to every new Citizen Science project. Furthermore, we were able to welcome new project partners from all across Europe, Australia and the United States of America on SPOTTERON. 

At SPOTTERON, we love it when science, design and art come together to create something quite special and unique. One of those special things are the clay animation videos by Max Helmberger.

An analysis of the state of the mobile web conducted by SimilarWeb earlier this year presented on Perficient Digital digital marketing agency has shown that usage of the mobile internet vs the desktop went down compared to 2017 but is still higher than in 2016.

It’s mushroom season here in Austria, which means it’s the perfect time to introduce you to the Mushroom Finder- the SPOTTERON mushroop app for citizen scientist! 

In the Tea Bag Index Citizen Science App, everything is about soil. Various observation categories are ready to participate in, from easy soil classification and testing to the well-known method of burying and weighting teabags to measure the decay rate of plants. Citizen Scientists are welcome to participate worldwide and contribute to improving climate models and soil research.

In this blog series we would like to introduce all our apps and give you an overview of the diverse world of Citizen Science and its possibilities.
The SpiderSpotter App was created in cooperation with the University of Ghent, and will be enjoyed by all spider lovers!

A brand new feature for all Citizen Science apps on the SPOTTERON platform comes with the next release version: Citizen Science Events. With this new extension, the project teams can publish events like workshops or field trips directly in the Citizen Science app. Secondly, it is possible to create area events, to e.g. highlight, where more observations by the Citizen Scientists are needed.