Hi there,

Please help us test a possible new Zooniverse project - Catalina Outer Solar System Survey

What the researchers say:

"For over twenty years the Catalina Sky Survey has been collecting images of the sky night after night. Hidden deep in these images are exotic and primordial solar-system worlds yet to be discovered: Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs).

By looking at images of the same patch of sky over several months, the motion of distant TNOs can be detected. However, computers often make false detections, and this is where you come in! The detected motion needs to be confirmed, and the human eye is supremely adapted to just this task. This project seeks volunteers to review animated images to make the final determination of whether an object is a real TNO or not. Are you ready to discover new distant, icy worlds?"

Try it out now at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/fulsdavid/catalina-outer-solar-system-survey and give us your feedback via this form https://forms.gle/aUCRCTbMpVRVZyibA (which you can also reach by clicking the link on the project itself).

What the researchers say:
"Fast Radio Bursts are massive bursts of radio energy we see from across (half) the universe. We call them Fast Radio Bursts because that's what we see - a brief millisecond 'burst' of energy in radio waves.

What are they? We don't know! But every burst we find tells us a little more about what's happening. We need to find these bursts!

Sounds easy right? Just look for bright bursts of radio. Unfortunately, we humans also like to make lots of really bright, really short radio signals. We need your help to sort through our data -- is it coming from humans, or from space?

We'll use your classifications to find more fast radio bursts and discover where they come from."

Hi there,

Please help us test a potential new Zooniverse project - VerbaAlpina

NOTE: This is the second round of beta testing for this project, so you may have seen it before. However, significant changes have been made so we would very much appreciate your review again.

What the researchers say:
"Since marking and transcribing are major parts of our work in the research project VerbaAlpina, we would like to use the power of the crowd to accomplish these tasks. In our project you will be presented with maps from the Italian atlas AIS (Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz). We would be very pleased if you would help us mark and transcribe these maps according to the instructions given in the tutorial. And don't worry: Especially marking and also transcribing are pretty easy! There is also no previous knowledge of Italian needed."

How to help out:
Try it out now at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/filip-hr/VerbaAlpina and give us your feedback via this form https://forms.gle/qtpVpjvr5FNBcpNq8 (which you can also reach by clicking the link on the project itself).

Your feedback is extremely important to us when deciding whether to approve or reject a project. To date you have helped launch over 250 Zooniverse projects!

Thanks for all your help!

Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

I hope you're doing as well as possible right now. I come bearing good news from the Zooniverse - we have just launched a new project, and as always we would really appreciate any help you can give towards it.

ATHENA: Spot Species in Fine Art

A lot remains unknown about how the natural world has been impacted by humans. Exploring historical paintings can reveal biological and cultural aspects of the historical relationship between man and nature. For this, we invite you to help spot plants and animals in fine art. A selection of paintings and printed art from the tremendous collection of the Dutch Rijksmuseum is ready to be classified.

By classifying these works of art, you help us build the ATHENA portal which documents the history of biodiversity in the Netherlands. ATHENA is a project funded by a core team of researchers with backgrounds in Biology and History, supported by a broad consortium of knowledge-, heritage- and open institutions. The project aims to develop an internationally unique database allowing researchers from multiple scientific disciplines to study human-nature relationships. The resulting database will provide a platform for large-scale, comparative (both in space and time) and multilevel studies of human-nature relationships. In this portal, paintings will be included to show the history of the iconography of animals and fauna in the Netherlands. However, for many paintings, it is unknown which species are depicted. For this, we ask for your help!

Learn more, and get involved at http://species-in-art.com


Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new Etch A Cell project on the Zooniverse: EtchA Cell – VR

We need your help to analyse a new data set. In this project, we ask you to draw around a variety of different subcellular structures (organelles) from the same set of images of a cancer cell, starting with the mitochondria (which you may already be familiar with if you’ve taken part in one of our previous projects, Etch A Cell – Powerhouse Hunt).

This project will generate data that will be used to help improve understanding of cell biology. One of the approaches we will use to look at the data produced will be to create a virtual reality (VR) experience. VR can be used as another way to make sense of complex data like the data we produce in Etch A Cell.

Get involved and give the project a try at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/h-spiers/etch-a-cell-vr.

Thanks for your help!
Grant and the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

I hope you are doing well this week so far! It is my absolute pleasure to inform you about the launch of two brand new projects on the Zooniverse:


Are You Talking to ME? Tagging Speech to Children and Adults

Researchers from Duke University in North Carolina need your help to classify whether some short sound clips are addressed to young children or to adults. This is part of a research study they hope will help us better understand the types of speech infants hear.

Learn more, and get involved now at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/fedebul/are-you-talking-to-me-tagging-speech-to-children-and-adults.


World Architecture Unlocked

In this project the team from the Courtauld Institute of Art needs your help to transcribe one of the most comprehensive and mysterious collections of architectural photography in the world. Join them and explore the Conway Library - one of the world's largest collections of architectural photography.

Learn more, and get involved now at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/courtaulddigital/world-architecture-unlocked.


Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

I'm delighted to bring some good news your way today! The Zooniverse has just launched a new project from the Science Scribbler team - Science Scribbler: Placenta Profiles

The placenta is the organ that connects a mother to her baby during pregnancy and enables the baby to grow. This vital organ has many essential jobs to do such as transferring oxygen and nutrients from the mother to her growing baby. If the placenta fails to work properly it can lead to pregnancy complications where the baby can be born too small, too early, is very unwell, or does not survive. Understanding why placentas fail will help us to understand why some pregnancies suffer complications. How well the placenta works is related to its development and structure. However, the structure of the placenta is difficult to study because there are lots of different cell types. Placenta Profiles is a project that aims to explore in detail the complex structure of the placenta.

We're starting with mitochondria - the powerhouse of the cell! In this project, we ask you to place a mark near the center of each mitochondrion you see in each image. This effort will help improve our understanding of mitochondrial dynamics in the placenta and help train computers to analyse new data even faster in the future!

The placenta is very complex and still holds many questions. Help us answer them now at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/msbrhonclif/science-scribbler-placenta-profiles.

Thanks for your help!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

Happy New Year from the Zooniverse Team! We wish you all the best in 2021, and we hope that you are willing to join us again this year. Speaking of which, allow us to introduce to you two brand new projects that could really benefit from your help:


Citizen ASAS-SN

Citizen ASAS-SN is a project that focuses on the classification of variable stars using light curves obtained by the All-Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN). ASAS-SN is a global network of robotic telescopes that has monitored the entire visible sky every night since 2014. We want your help to classify thousands of potential variable star candidates (out of over 100 million stars) in our data. We will use your classifications to identify both classical and unusual variable stars, which we hope can lead us to new astrophysical insights. The study of variable stars has a rich history, and we want you to join us in our efforts to contribute to this field!

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/tharinduj/citizen-asas-sn.


Old Weather - WW2

There is a new Old Weather project now available on the Zooniverse. The aim of this project is to recover hidden marine weather data recorded in U.S. Navy ships’ logbooks during World War II, and we need your help. Like all Old Weather projects, these data will be used to drive sophisticated computer models that help us understand and reconstruct weather and climate in extraordinary detail. But there is another goal that is just as vital – to uncover the source of a mysterious distortion in sea-surface temperature data collected during the war. This distortion, known as the World War II Warm Anomaly, is large enough to affect the long-term global mean sea-surface temperature record, and hence our understanding of how the Earth’s climate has changed over time.

Because of the work we’ve been doing with the U.S. National Archives over the past eight years or so we are in a unique position to help investigate this question – we have digital images of many of the original U.S. Navy logbooks, a resource unavailable to earlier investigators. The small sample of logbooks we are transcribing in this project were selected because they are representative of different ship types deployed by the U.S. Navy, from destroyers and cruisers to cargo ships. More importantly, they were at times in the same place, occasionally even moored alongside each other in port. All but two survived the entire war, 1941-1945. Twelve were based at Pearl Harbor in 1941, eighteen were in the Aleutian Islands in 1942-1943, and ten were caught in Typhoon Cobra in December 1944. This opens up many opportunities to investigate sources of bias in the data, from factors associated with different ship types, the weather instruments in use at different times, or changes in methods required by wartime operations (such as blackout for example). It will also be possible to investigate how tropical and sub-polar environments may have influenced the data in different ways.

At the end of this project we should be able to verify whether or not the warm anomaly during the 1940s is real or an artefact, and, if it’s the latter, describe what factors explain the bias in the data. If the bias hypothesis turns out to be true, the corrected ocean temperature record would appear to evolve upward more smoothly through the 20th century.

The project is led by an international team of scientists from the University of Washington (CICOES), University of Colorado (CIRES), NOAA, the UK Met Office, and the University of Reading. For more information see our blog post and join the project at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/krwood/old-weather-ww2 to lend a hand.


Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

Why not switch off from the rest of the world for a while and immerse yourself in a Zooniverse project, where you can actively help people and further educate yourself at the same time? If that sounds good to you, then I have some fantastic news! We have just launched two brand new projects that would really benefit from your time and attention:



UK Tides

This new project asks volunteers to help digitise sea level measurements from historical handwritten ledgers. The data will be used to study climate change and sea level rise and will be included in the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) dataset, which is used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The ledgers were written in the 19th Century using values read from charts. These charts were produced by tide gauges, which automatically recorded the state of the tide. We have over 200 ledgers in our archives at the National Oceanography Centre and we want to improve access to and encourage reuse of the data. The project focuses on two sites near Liverpool in the North West of England: Hilbre Island and George's Dock - two of the longest records we have.

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/psmsl/uk-tides



Phish Finders

Phishing is a kind of online attack where bad actors use misleading online materials, like bait in actual fishing, to attempt to steal personal information or get users to download malware onto their computers. Despite preventative technologies, like spam filters and firewalls, approximately 14.25 billion phishing emails make it into user inboxes each year causing around 70 million people to be victimized globally.

Preventative technology alone can’t solve the problem. Phishing is ultimately a human-centric problem that requires users to make choices about what they trust. Enter Phish Finders. Phish Finders asks citizen scientists to identify indicators of phishing in email and website images.

This information is needed to inform research and training techniques that help people better learn to identify and avoid phishing. Your participation helps us better understand what types of signals of phishing are easiest and hardest to identify and how phishing signal detection changes with practice.

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/holliekrosser/phish-finders


Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

Happy Tuesday! If you were just thinking about how you really want to hear about a new project that you can get involved in, I have some fantastic and timely news for you...


Rebuild Maastricht

We are happy to announce the launch of Rebuild Maastricht!

This project asks volunteers to digitally rebuild the city of Maastricht (The Netherlands) as it was in 1752. During the 18th century, French forces besieged and captured the city. The French soldiers were then tasked with carefully recording all buildings in the city, as to create a detailed physical scale-model that could be used for planning military strategy. This physical model remains today, but to make it more accessible, we plan to make a digital model.

The images of the buildings we ask volunteers to classify come from a 3D model of the city which was created by many pictures of the physical scale model from different perspectives, and then stitching these together (photogrammetry). However, by using this technique, many details from the buildings have become unclear, and the model itself is too ‘heavy’ to run on most computers. Therefore, we want to make a new digital model that can be handled more easily, and that can be used by historians and the public to better understand the history of Maastricht. This requires us to record all the features of each separate building, much like the French soldiers did in the 18th century.

This is a task that our small project team of Dutch archaeologists, historians and 3D researchers cannot complete alone. Your contribution to this project will help our team to complete the new model and ultimately to discover and share fascinating stories about the city of Maastricht and its inhabitants in the 18th century.

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/tijdlab/rebuild-maastricht.


Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

If yesterday's new project wasn't what you're into, then I have some excellent news for you - we launched another brand new project today!


Sedimental Values: Digging In to La Brea’s Past

This new project from the La Brea Tar Pits and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County asks you to help transcribe and organize field note measurements from more than 40 years of excavations in Pit 91, one of the richest fossil deposits at La Brea Tar Pits.

Your contributions to Sedimental Values will allow the Museum to plan for preparation and curation of a collection numbering in the tens of thousands or maybe more! It will allow our curators, students and visiting paleontologists to ask research questions about Paleoecology and target their efforts on particular samples or specimens.

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/jmschell/sedimental-values-digging-in-to-la-breas-past.


Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

I have three Zooniverse announcements for you this week. The first two are about brand new projects you might be interested in that really could use your help as they get off to a start, and the third is about an existing Zooniverse project specifically looking for your help this week to record and remember those who were victims of the Holocaust:


Addressing Health

Help discover the extent of poor health among British postal workers in the 1800s. Join the project and transcribe the causes and rates of sickness absence and retirement for the UK’s Post Office employees.

By transcribing this unique set of records, we can learn about the effects of working and living environments on the health of tens of thousands of workers. We’ll find out how sickness rates changed over time and varied between different types of places. This will be a major advance as information about ill health for the Victorian and Edwardian period has, until now, mainly relied on causes of death.

Addressing Health is a Wellcome-funded collaboration between King’s College London, Kingston University, University of Derby and University College London, with The Postal Museum.

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/dhlbrown/addressing-health.


FrogSong

FrogSong is an audio based project that involves listening to audio and classifying frog calls. Advances in acoustic recorder technology are allowing researchers to collect more environmental audio than ever before. However, extracting useful information from these recordings is still a challenge. By identifying frog calls in short audio clips you will help us develop automated techniques at detecting species calls from recordings.

If we can identify frog species in long recordings we will be able to improve our understanding frog calling patterns and behaviours. By monitoring frog calling patterns in long-term recordings we hope to understand: the environmental drivers of frog chorusing and other group behaviours, how frog calls and other noise sources interact to structure frog communities, as well as monitor how frog communities change through time in response to environmental stressors.

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sladeaa/frogsong.


Every Name Counts

On January 27 (Holocaust Remembrance Day) the Arolsen Archives would like to commemorate the victims of Nazism by actively engaging with the past. 600,000 documents from different concentration camps are available in the Zooniverse project Every Name Counts, waiting to be indexed. Everyone can participate, no experience needed, and even with a few minutes to spare you can get started. On your own, with your family or even in an online meeting with your friends and colleagues. Please join the efforts to make these documents available to the world and build a digital memorial for the Nazi victims.

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/arolsen-archives/every-name-counts.

Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

Please help us test a new Zooniverse project - HMS NHS: The Nautical Health Service

What the researchers say:
"HMS NHS: The Nautical Health Service, refers to the records of the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital at Greenwich. This was the main clinical site of the Seamen’s Hospital Society (now Seafarer’s Hospital Society), founded with the philanthropic mission of providing relief to sick and injured seafarers of all nations. Throughout the period 1821-1870 it was a floating hospital, based in three successive converted warships, the first named Grampus and later HMS Dreadnought, a veteran of the battle of Trafalgar. It then moved on land and until 1986 occupied the buildings which are now a student hub for the University of Greenwich.

The Admissions Registers we are transcribing include details such as a seafarer's name, age and place of birth, rank, employer and last vessel served on. Medical information includes dates of admission and discharge, medical condition and fate. The patients were seafarers from all over the globe, reflecting the international traffic of the port of London. Casualties from local emergencies, among them women and children, were also admitted, as were naval personnel during wartime.

Traditionally used by family history researchers to trace individual maritime ancestors, the records also have great potential for research, including the history of medicine and diseases, the evolution of treatment of common illnesses and injuries within the maritime workforce, which illnesses were most prevalent in seaman returning from specific parts of the world and an almost unlimited number of case studies for examining the effects of advances in medical knowledge, treatment and recovery times. The records also offer additional perspectives on diverse subjects, such as the history of black and Asian communities within the maritime world. Viewed quantitatively, they show the variety and prevalence of disease, injuries and common ailments in the merchant navy for over a hundred years."

How to help out:
Try it out now at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/msalmon/hms-nhs-the-nautical-health-service and give us your feedback via this form https://forms.gle/UohJCxSzgywyqjCY8 (which you can also reach by clicking the link on the project itself).

Your feedback is extremely important to us when deciding whether to approve or reject a project. To date you have helped launch over 300 Zooniverse projects!

Thanks for all your help!

Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

Some good news from the Zooniverse this week - The Etchiverse is expanding!

This week we’re really excited to launch two brand new Etch A Cell projects to study cell biology, ‘Etch A Cell – Fat Checker’ and ‘Etch A Cell – ER’.


Etch A Cell – Fat Checker

The balance between health and disease depends on activities carried out by cells of the body. This new project is part of the Etch A Cell suite of activities to examine cell structure. Etch A Cell - Fat Checker is focused on studying fats and lipids inside cells. We particularly want to study the number, size and location of lipid droplets in cells, as this will help us understand how different subcellular components interact and work together to use stored fat to power metabolism.

To do this, we need you to help us by looking for and outlining lipid droplets in images taken by a very powerful electron microscope. The data you provide will be used to study the 3-dimensional architecture of lipid droplets in cells. This information will help biologists to understand the complex roles that lipids play in health and disease.

Learn more, and get involved at

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/dwright04/etch-a-cell-fat-checker


Etch A Cell – ER

Cell division is essential for life, growth and development. When cell division goes wrong, it can lead to the development of diseases.

In Etch A Cell - ER we need your help to study how the Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER) of a cell changes during cell division. The ER is often one of the biggest structures in a cell and is involved in lots of important cellular processes including the production and transport of new proteins.

Your effort will help improve our understanding of biology and study disease!

Learn more, and get involved at:

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/h-spiers/etch-a-cell-er


Thanks for all your help,

Helen and the Etch A Cell Team

Hi there,

I hope you're doing well. Just one new Zooniverse project for me to tell you about this week, but let me assure you it's a cracker, and the research team will be appreciative of any help you can give them:


Dark Energy Explorers

We are on the hunt for distant galaxies to measure Dark Energy for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). In our local universe, Dark Energy is the mysterious term astronomers use to explain why galaxies expand away from each other at an increasing rate. We are searching for this by using distant galaxies to create the largest three dimensional map of the universe ever produced. The map will allow HETDEX astronomers to measure how fast the universe was expanding at different times in its history.

Various explanations for dark energy predict different changes in the expansion rate, so by providing exact measurements of the expansion, the HETDEX map will eliminate some of the competing ideas. We need your help to identify the signals that are from distant galaxies. These galaxies are 10 billion light years away and we expect to discover millions of them, so check out Dark Energy Explorers to get started discovering!

Lean more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/erinmc/dark-energy-explorers.


Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

I have another pair of brand new Zooniverse projects to introduce you to today. They are in very different fields of research from each other, but they both have one major thing in common - neither of them can get their work done without your help!



Building Detective for Disaster Preparedness

Natural hazards are an intensified global threat to the built environment and our society. UC Berkeley’s NHERI SimCenter [https://simcenter.designsafe-ci.org] is improving computational capabilities to simulate the hazards, quantify potential damages, and understand effective preparedness and mitigation strategies.

A critical aspect of this process is to have computer models that accurately represent buildings and assets in the hazard’s path. This requires collecting accurate information about buildings. In this project, deep learning algorithms are employed to analyze the physical features of buildings that can be at risk from natural hazards. With your help in providing annotations to a set of images, the project will use the annotated images to train the algorithms. The trained algorithms will be used for analyzing the risk of larger inventories of buildings in many regions, and this effort will guide pre-disaster preparedness and mitigate the impacts of natural hazards.

learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/simcenter/building-detective-for-disaster-preparedness

The Arctic Bears Project

Researchers are learning how polar, grizzly, and black bears behave in the changing Arctic environment, with special attention to how they interact with people. The images you'll see come from remote cameras set up on the fences of field camps in Wapusk National Park, on the west coast of Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada. Wapusk means "white bear" in the Cree language, and the park was established in 1996. At the time the park was established the area was well-known for its importance as polar bear denning habitat, and local people knew black bears lived in the forests there, but the appearance of grizzly bears in the late 1990s was a surprise. Read more about our research findings here.

There are a whole lot of people who all contribute to making this project happen: and not just the researchers. Wapusk National Park's staff in Churchill, Manitoba, got the ball rolling in 2010 and since then community members in Churchill and elsewhere have helped shape this project. Their enthusiasm for non-invasive wildlife research tools, and for the unexpected things seen on the cameras, motivates the research team. In the early days of this work the team were just excited that their cameras survived over the winter, but pretty soon they were realizing just how many photos we were collecting.

This is where you come in: Your help processing a decade's worth of pictures from a changing sub-Arctic landscape is a critical task, and the team are so grateful to have your assistance with this research. These photos are downloaded once a year from most cameras, and the days when the team finally see those images are special treats. They hope you experience the same feeling!

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/douglas-clark/the-arctic-bears-project

Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Angling for Data on Michigan Fishes

This new project from the University of Michigan and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources asks volunteers to help transcribe more than a century's worth of fish observation records, captured on a variety of paper cards, from lakes throughout Michigan.

Volunteer contributions to the project will allow researchers and resource managers to better understand how factors such as development, invasive species, deforestation, and climate change have affected fish populations over the last hundred years. In addition, we'll utilize the latest in data science to combine data on fish, habitat characteristics and management approaches from a variety of historical surveys in new ways, allowing us to build models that explain how and why fish populations have changed over recent decades, predict what changes are likely to occur in the future, and test which management strategies will improve the resilience of fish populations.

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/jmschell/angling-for-data-on-michigan-fishes.


Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Tag Along with Adler

Tag Along with Adler is a new project from the Adler Planetarium in Chicago that invites you to join the curatorial process of describing objects. Have you ever done an internet search for a specific thing, but found that no matter what you typed in the search bar you couldn’t find what you were looking for? This sort of issue happens most frequently when the language used by the searcher differs from the language used by the institution.

Most museums make their collections searchable online by adding descriptions of their objects; however, depending on how they describe the objects it could impact how users find them. As part of Tag Along with Adler we are asking you to look at the visual art within our collections of works on paper, rare book illustrations, and historic photographs to add the terms you would use to find these images. The Adler acknowledges that it is impossible for any one person to anticipate the language of everyone, so we ask for your help in getting more access points to our data. At the same time we will introduce you to tags created by Artificial Intelligence models, allowing you to compare the tags a computer would add vs. the tags you would add.
In this project, consensus is not the goal. The Adler asks you to join in and help us enrich access to our collections!

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/webster-institute/tag-along-with-adler.



Buzzy Bee - African Canopy Pollinators

Would you like to discover some of the tallest African tree canopies? You will not need any harness nor ropes as we are happy to announce the launch of Buzzy Bee – African Canopy Pollinators!

In this new project, citizen scientists count and identify insect pollinators from videos collected in tree canopies in Central Africa. The project focuses on the relationship between pollen dispersal distances, floral traits, and pollinators of 6 different timber tree species that are heavily exploited. The data from this survey are used to better understand regeneration cycles of timber species and will help forest concessions to define sustainable exploitation practices, for example a minimal post-exploitation density ensuring sufficient mating opportunities between remaining trees.

Video footage was collected during two distinct flowering events in three areas of tropical rainforest in Cameroon and Gabon. They were recorded with homemade IoT cameras continuously filming flowers during two to three days, for a total of 597h of footage. Treatment of such data set by one or few EBE scientists (Université Libre de Bruxelles) is not optimal. Your contributions to the Buzzy Bee – African Canopy Pollinators project will help the research team analyze this valuable data and provide insightful information for wildlife conservation.

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/obhasin/buzzy-bee-african-canopy-pollinators.



Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team

Hi there,

You'll be delighted to hear I have not one, but two brand new and exciting Zooniverse projects to introduce you to this week! Have a read below to find out a bit more about them, and please do take part and help the research teams out if you have the interest and time:



Microbe Watch

Toxoplasma gondii is the most common parasite in humans, and is particularly dangerous for people with underlying health conditions such as HIV/AIDS. The team's work at the Host-Toxoplasma Interaction Lab at the University of Birmingham uses an artificial intelligence platform called HRMAn to analyse how Toxoplasma is attacked by the cells it infects. Now they need your help to improve it!

You will be asked to analyse microscope images of infected cells to decide whether they have responded to parasites inside them or not. The images that you classify will be used to re-train HRMAn’s neural networks, and make it even better at recognising infection. Your help on this project will facilitate infection biology research and improve our understanding of human health and disease.

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sb99/microbe-watch

VerbaAlpina

In this project, researchers from the Digital Humanities project VerbaAlpina of Munich University need your help marking and transcribing linguistic attestations of dialect maps from the Italian atlas AIS (Atlante linguistico ed etnografico dell'Italia e della Svizzera meridionale, “Linguistic and ethnographic atlas of Italy and southern Switzerland”).

The project VerbaAlpina seeks to investigate the linguistic and cultural area of the Alpine region from a transnational perspective. Most of the linguistic data VerbaAlpina works with comes from traditional linguistic atlases and dictionaries. One of these linguistic atlases is the AIS. To analyse the atlas data, they first have to undergo a process of systematic data processing. The first step of this process is the transcription of the data.

Even though the data from linguistic atlases could - at least in theory - can be transcribed automatically using OCR software, the assignment of number and text on the atlas maps remains an unsolved problem that could not yet be automated (not even using AI technology). Therefore, we need your help for both assigning words to the corresponding number (in our marking task) and for transcribing the words on the maps (in our optional transcription task).

Learn more, and get involved at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/filip-hr/verbaalpina

Thanks so much for your continued efforts on the Zooniverse!
Grant & the Zooniverse Team