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When you picture a scientist, do you see a white coat-clad PhD-holder pipetting away at a lab bench? Or maybe a skygazer with a different day job who goes out on clear nights for a good view of the stars?

Historically speaking, both of those examples fit the bill. German-British astronomer William Herschel was originally an amateur who observed the night sky using homemade telescopes. He discovered Uranus in 1781, working alongside his sister, Caroline Herschel, who made multiple discoveries herself.

Countless contributors have much less name recognition, too. Since 1890, the National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program in the United States has recruited volunteers nationwide to jot down daily meteorological observations like rainfall and temperature, which are key to piecing together a record of climate trends over time.

READ MORE: Many in U.S. doubt their individual impact on fighting climate change

There’s a term for people who contribute to this knowledge purely out of love of the game: citizen scientists. And opportunities to get involved with federally run or sponsored initiatives — from mapping mosquito habitats with smartphones to tallying up plastic pellets spotted on the beach — have only expanded over time.

“The weird thing is not that people volunteer to do science,” said Marc Kuchner, the citizen science officer for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “The weird thing is people get paid to do science.”

Agencies from NASA to NOAA to the United States Geological Survey and beyond are looping nonprofessionals in to help them execute a wide range of scientific projects. Doing so allows researchers to collect larger data sets, plus analyze existing ones.

Most projects average around 200 volunteers who contribute data or perform some type of data analysis, but that number can skyrocket to the hundreds of thousands for virtual initiatives, said Jarah Meador, director of open innovation and technology transformation services at the General Services Administration. She also oversees the websites for federal citizen science initiatives and competitive innovation challenges, both of which are open to the public.

Different projects have varying quality assurance protocols to ensure the collected data are legitimate, but there’s also strength in numbers. The greater the number of people verifying the same object within an image, for example, means greater confidence in the accuracy of the results.

Kuchner offered an example with Aurorasaurus, which asks observers to report sightings of the northern lights. “Let’s say six people around different parts of Greenland, all pointing in the same general direction, all report seeing [aurora borealis] at the same time, and they don’t know each other,” he said. “That’s pretty solid, right?”

In-person initiatives invite participants to get outside and engage with nature, or even gather data aimed at addressing environmental injustice. Some agencies are increasingly partnering with communities to figure out how these programs can address local needs while also contributing to information-gathering for federal projects.

That kind of engagement – making sure a project aligns with the community – is what these initiatives are all about, researchers say.

Citizen scientists “want to not only consume the information about the environment they’re living in and the science going on around them, but they want to participate in it, because they care about it,” Meador said.

Technological advances have opened doors for people who want to participate in citizen science from home. In 2006, a project dubbed Stardust@home pioneered the method of putting massive amounts of data online, often in the form of images, and asking volunteers to analyze it, Kuchner said.

Since then, amateur astronomers have had a wealth of options to lend their time to science. NASA has 29 citizen science initiatives, many of which are housed on the platform Zooniverse, he noted. There, users can contribute their time to a wide range of research projects from NASA and other institutions, from searching for planets and brown dwarfs to transcribing centuries-old letters.

One program called the Sungrazer Project, which isn’t affiliated with Zooniverse, asks users to examine photos from two different spacecraft missions to search for comets. That program arose after researchers involved with one of the missions were bombarded with emails from curious observers who had perused the mission’s digital archive. These explorers wanted to know if various blips they had spotted in certain photos could be noteworthy. The researchers put out guidance for people to use when digitally comet hunting, and Sungrazer was born.

Could all of this be performed through computer analysis rather than by real people? No, according to Kuchner, who said that it wouldn’t be ethical to ask volunteers to complete tasks that could be automated. The whole point is that agencies like NASA need as many eyes as they can get to accomplish this work.

READ MORE: How young people feel about climate change and their future

But citizen science and machine learning can go hand-in-hand. Sometimes the work of real people helps train software to do the type of tasks volunteers do, or machine learning takes the “first crack” at analyzing a data set before human eyes come in to do the rest, Kuchner explained, adding that a volunteer’s dedication to their project or projects of choice varies widely.

“Some users are just casual users. They stop by and they do 10 minutes of NASA science, and we’re grateful for them,” he said. “And then other folks, they’ll turn a NASA citizen science project into their retirement project, or it’ll become a career.”

That’s true for Michaela Allen, who switched her major from business to physics in undergrad after discovering citizen science through one of NASA’s programs. Now, she’s a laboratory instructor and observatory director at Colby College, where she encourages students to explore what citizen science can teach them about their own interests.

“It’s free and it’s fun, that’s what I always tell everyone,” Allen said. “I just think it’s a really great platform to check what you’re interested in.”

Researchers can’t be everywhere at once. That’s why projects across federal agencies are powered by the immense amount of data that can be collected with the help of citizen scientists.

“A lot of our projects that we support and run, the number of eyes we get on the ground and on the sky and on the ocean would not really be feasible without citizen science support,” said John McLaughlin, education program manager at NOAA’s Office of Education.

Those kinds of local perspectives can also offer insight into what specific communities need. McLaughlin pointed to a new survey, Tornado Tales, that asks people who have lived through those weather events to describe their experiences. The goal is to improve weather communications designed to keep people informed and safe.

Volunteers Octavia Jones and her two children Taegan and Tristen Harris are seen in this July 2021 photo using a car sensor to collect heat data in the Bronx as part of the NOAA and partner Heat Island Mapping Campaign. Photo courtesy Octavia Jones via NOAA

When a project is launched across multiple locations, the results can be useful both for NOAA and the people on the ground responsible for data collection. The agency’s Urban Heat Island Mapping campaigns train city-dwellers to use sensors affixed to bikes or cars to record temperature differences across their communities. Unlike satellites, the sensors can help gauge the exact conditions people are experiencing when they step outside.

On a hot summer day, the temperature of one location can be as much as 18 degrees warmer or cooler than somewhere else in the same city, McLaughlin noted. The project’s findings underscore well-known environmental injustices: More affluent areas tend to be cooler due to more shade or proximity to water, and the hottest temperatures are recorded in areas near a lot of industry or transportation hubs, many of which are home to low-income residents and Black and brown residents.

Using the data, analysts were able to compare current heat disparities in Richmond, Virginia, to historical redlining that happened in that city. “There was still a very high correlation there,” McLaughlin added.

The information gathered via Urban Heat Island Mapping projects is certainly useful for NOAA, but communities also claim ownership. McLaughlin said it can be used in settings like urban planning and city-level meetings to influence decisions and actions on the local level.

Data collected by citizen scientists can help spur decisions that lead to meaningful change. A stretch of the Colorado River that runs through the Grand Canyon is impacted by the nearby Glen Canyon Dam, said Ted Kennedy, an aquatic ecologist at the USGS. Researchers want to know how the aquatic ecosystem is affected by the operations of that dam, but their access is limited by whitewater rapids and lack of road access.

To overcome those obstacles, the agency looked to a different kind of professional: guides who know the river better than most. The USGS pays guides it partners with to set up light traps that attract insects around dusk each night, and keep track of what types of species can be found on the river and what their abundance looks like.

“It’s turned out to be this incredibly powerful tool for monitoring invertebrate populations throughout the Grand Canyon, [which] are key prey items for native fish,” Kennedy said.

The project even spurred the Glen Canyon Dam to participate in what he calls a “bug flow experiment” during the summer from 2018 to 2020 . That involved altering water flow on weekends, when energy demand is lower, so that a stable amount was available for various insects to help them successfully lay eggs . The experiment’s motto? “Give bugs the weekend off,” Kennedy said.

Evidence suggests the experiment also helped bugs during the larval stage. Researchers saw a 400 percent increase in the abundance of caddisflies during its first year, which means the eggs that species laid the year prior benefitted from the experiment.

“I’ll hang my hat on that kind of thing any day,” he said.

The researchers were able to make that calculation thanks to the years of baseline insect abundance and diversity data gathered by river guides since they started their citizen science project back in 2012.

For Gibney Siemion, a river guide and riparian ecologist at the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council who has set light traps on her tours of the Colorado River for years, contributing to this data collection adds extra meaning to an experience that can already be “transformational” for participants.

“Guiding is really fun and very dynamic work, but I also like thinking about the ecological systems that we’re immersed in down there,” Siemion said. “And so it has a depth of experience for me, and I feel like for our passengers, to just do this really simple data collection every day.”

Every two years, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issues a report on how the federal government uses citizen science, plus similar programs that hinge on public participation. Demographic information on the people who participate in federal citizen science projects is voluntarily reported by each activities’ sponsoring agency, a spokesperson for OSTP told the PBS NewsHour via email.

There isn’t a single place to get a bird’s eye view of everyone who participates in citizen science across all of the federal agencies that support those programs. The OSTP spokesperson said that there are legal constraints that limit the collection of information from the public, and emphasized the importance of protecting the data and identities of those who participate in citizen science programs and share their data. There’s a federal effort to discuss how to design the next surveyon citizen science programs and related activities so that the report and its data is “more useful and accessible,” they added.

But other analyses have looked into the demographics of citizen science volunteers, including those who participate in programs that aren’t federally run. A recent study published in BioScience collected demographic data from nearly 4,000 citizen scientists across several independent and government-affiliated projects — including an annual Christmas bird count put on by the Audubon Society, a wildlife survey in North Carolina jointly run by a state agency and institution and users of a website that connects people with citizen science opportunities.

The citizen scientists who responded to the voluntary surveys distributed by these researchers were “overwhelmingly white, highly educated and worked in science or science-adjacent fields,” Bradley Allf, lead author of the study and a PhD Candidate at North Carolina State University’s College of Natural Resources told the PBS NewsHour via email.

He said that trend by and large reflects citizen scientists in the U.S. as a whole, but noted that some projects — like community-led justice initiatives — are likely to be “much more diverse” than the ones sampled within this study.

“If one of the goals of citizen science is to empower more people with science, the practice needs to do a better job of deliberately reaching out to new groups of people who don’t already have access to science,” Allf added.

Evidence suggests that failure to engage a diverse set of participants can lead to skewed data. A 2020 case study looked at the Illinois RiverWatch program, which asks volunteers to collect water quality data at locations of their choice across the state. Researchers, some of whom were affiliated with the RiverWatch program, concluded that those volunteers were largely more white, wealthy and educated than the rest of the state’s population, and that “areas of high environmental justice concern” were underrepresented in monitoring. That dynamic can result in an incomplete data set that cannot paint a fully representative picture of water quality in the state, which the study’s authors say could worsen environmental justice disparities.

Emphasizing collaborative projects that emerge in response to a community question or issue that can be solved with science is one way to increase engagement with citizen science, and to make sure programs are more relevant to people’s lives, Allf said.

McLaughlin noted that nearly all of NOAA programs involve partnerships, and that those relationships must be mutually beneficial. Co-creating projects with the public ensures that they meet the needs of both the agency and community groups.

Alondra Nelson, who leads the OSTP, echoed that sentiment during her remarks at an event on the subject of open innovation in July. She spoke about the importance of and the need for more collaborative research partnerships and co-production of knowledge with communities.

The goal, Nelson said, is to “create two-way streets of communication, so communities can raise what’s important to them and figure out solutions that work for them, and so that scientists can make their work more relevant and grounded in those communities, increasing the reach and impact of our science and innovation, and thus providing benefits to everyone.”

Left: Citizen scientists on a Grand Canyon Youth river trip deploy a light trap to help monitor aquatic insect populations on the Colorado River. Photo courtesy Freshwaters Illustrated/USGS

By Hannah Fingerhut, Associated Press

By Felicia Fonseca and Sam Metz, Associated Press

By Scott Denning, The Conversation

Isabella Isaacs-Thomas is a digital reporter on the PBS NewsHour's science desk.

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