Study Hall

Take part in activities that involve real data collection you can do from home as a citizen scientist.

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Activities

Connect to birds, with nature, and with each other during the 28th Annual Great Backyard Bird Count February 14–17, 2025, when the world comes together for the love of birds. Spend time in your favorite places watching birds—then tell us about them! 

When, where, and how far will birds migrate? How many birds passed last night? Visit BirdCast for a list of tools to help you explore the answers to these and many other questions about bird migration.

NestWatch is a nationwide nest-monitoring program designed to track status and trends in the reproductive biology of birds. Participating in NestWatch is easy and anyone can do it.

Observations will be added to those of thousands of other NestWatchers in a continually growing database used by researchers to understand and study birds.

You’ll have to go fishing—an outdoor activity you can do by yourself!—for this assignment. Volunteer to tag fish for the American Littoral Society, whose citizen scientists have tagged more than 640,000 fish since the program began in 1965. 

The Appalachian Mountain Club's Mountain Watch program asks hikers to document alpine and forest plants for ecological research. Scientists then compile the information in an online database and analyze it for trends that could indicate changing climates.

Foldit is a revolutionary crowdsourcing computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research by solving protein-folding puzzles. 

TNMCorps is an online crowdsourcing mapping project with volunteers successfully editing structures in all 50 States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands