Citizen Science
Help real research by counting, measuring, and logging what you observe.
FreeCost to start
EasyDifficulty
30 min–3 hrTime / session
2 setup steps. Nothing to buy until you say so.
Is it you?
Nobody has scored this against your answers yet. 30 min–3 hr at a time, nothing to find out whether it sticks.
SpaceOpen area
The path15 quests
ASetting up2 things to sort, in any order
- Pick one project and make an account
- Read the project's tutorial properly
Then the quests
- Find a citizen science project to join
- Submit fifty classifications to one project
- Make your first observation or classification
More on Citizen Science
Everything else we have written about it. Free to read, no account needed.
Guides4
How to Grow Oyster Mushrooms at Home (From Spawn to First Harvest)Oyster mushrooms are the one to start with: they grow fast, they forgive beginner mistakes, and you can fruit a proper harvest from a bag of straw in a spare corner. You can buy a kit and skip most of the work, but growing from scratch is not much harder and it teaches you how mushrooms actually behave. Here is the whole process, start to finish.How to Find Things in the Night Sky (Star-Hopping for Beginners)The hard part of astronomy is not owning a telescope, it is finding anything with it. The skill that unlocks the sky is star-hopping: navigating from bright stars you know to the faint targets you do not. Here is how.How to Program a Repeater Into a Baofeng UV-5R (So It Actually Talks Back)You bought the cheap Baofeng, you can hear the local repeater, and now you key up and nothing happens. This is the wall almost every new ham hits, and it is almost never the radio. Programming a repeater into a UV-5R comes down to three numbers and one tone setting people forget. Here is exactly how to do it, both the easy way and the keypad way, and how to tell which setting you got wrong.How to Identify a Bird: The Four Things to Look AtIdentifying a bird feels impossible at first and then becomes second nature, once you know what to look at. Experienced birders do not memorise every species; they read four things. Here they are.
What to buy
Browse gear guidesFrom the blog1
Same shape of evening, different thing to hold at the end. Or follow a tag sideways.
Meteorology$232
Read the sky and the data well enough to call tomorrow's weather.
Entomology$69
Get close to the insect world, and collect, identify, and understand it.
Mycology$84
Learn the hidden kingdom of fungi from the forest floor up.
Dig carefully and read the past straight out of the dirt.