Doing science in the Zooniverse: Engaging the public to process enormous image datasets

Scientists are increasingly collecting vast quantities of data that computers cannot automatically process.  Citizen science - engaging the general public in scientific research – can rapidly and accurately process large quantities of data, expanding the scope and scale of questions answerable in ecological research. On www.zooniverse.org, 1.3 million people around the world have contributed hundreds of millions of classifications to 40 different research projects, producing expert quality data for nearly 100 academic publications. I will describe the new Zooniverse initiative to help all research teams, anywhere in the world, build their own citizen science projects and produce accurate, reliable data.