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The article reviews the research findings from the Solar Stormwatch citizen-science project which encourages participants to study coronal mass ejections (CMEs) observed by the Heliospheric Imager instruments aboard the twin STEREO spacecraft. Topics discussed include the six Solar Stormwatch activities, namely Spot, Trace-it, Incoming Spot, Incoming Trace-it, What's that?, and Track it back, the Solar Stormwatch CME catalogue and the future of the project.

Citizen science has proliferated in the last decade, becoming a critical form of public engagement in science and an increasingly important research tool for the study of large-scale patterns in nature. Although citizen science is already interdisciplinary, it has untapped potential to build capacity for transformative research on coupled human and natural systems. New tools have begun to collect paired ecological and social data from the same individual; this allows for detailed examination of feedbacks at the level of individuals and potentially provides much-needed data for agent-based modeling. With the ongoing professionalization of citizen science, the field can benefit from integrating a coupled systems perspective, including a broadening of the social science perspectives considered. This can lead to new schema and platforms to increase support for large-scale research on coupled natural and human systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Zooniverse projects turn everyday people into "citizen scientists" who work online with real data to assist scientists in conducting research on a variety of topics related to galaxies, exoplanets, lunar craters, and solar flares, among others. This paper describes our initial study to assess the conceptual knowledge and reasoning abilities of citizen scientists participating in two Zooniverse projects: Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo. In order to measure their knowledge and abilities, we developed two new assessment instruments, the Zooniverse Astronomical Concept Survey (ZACS) and the Lunar Cratering Concept Inventory (LCCI). We found that citizen scientists with the highest level of participation in the Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo projects also have the highest average correct scores on the items of the ZACS and LCCI. However, the limited nature of the data provided by Zooniverse participants prevents us from being able to evaluate the statistical significance of this finding, and we make no claim about whether there is a causal relationship between one's participation in Galaxy Zoo or Moon Zoo and one's level of conceptual understanding or reasoning ability on the astrophysical topics assessed by the ZACS or the LCCI. Overall, both the ZACS and the LCCI provide Zooniverse's citizen scientists with items that offer a wide range of difficulties. Using the data from the small subset of participants who responded to all items of the ZACS, we found evidence suggesting the ZACS is a reliable instrument (α=0.78), although twenty-one of its forty items appear to have point biserials less than 0.3. The work reported here provides significant insight into the strengths and limitations of various methods for administering assessments to citizen scientists. Researchers who wish to study the knowledge and abilities of citizen scientists in the future should be sure to design their research methods to avoid the pitfalls identified by our initial findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizen science, in which volunteers work with professional scientists to conduct research, is expanding due to large online datasets. To plan projects, it is important to understand volunteers' motivations for participating. This paper analyzes results from an online survey of nearly 11 000 volunteers in Galaxy Zoo, an astronomy citizen science project. Results show that volunteers' primary motivation is a desire to contribute to scientific research. We encourage other citizen science projects to study the motivations of their volunteers, to see whether and how these results may be generalized to inform the field of citizen science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses efforts by citizen scientists to prepare celestial photographs from the journals of the organization American Astronomical Society for digitization through the project Astronomy Rewind.

The article offers information on topics related to astronomy. Topics discussed include the development of astronomical facilities at Copperbelt University, in Zambia by the International Astronomical Union, the agreement fund for the constuction of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile, and the volcanic eruptions of Jupiter's moon Io in the solar system which was shown in 2013 using the Gemini North Telescope's adaptive optics system.

The article reports on volunteers willing to participate in the Adromeda Project, a citizen science project of the scientists from the University of Utah, University of Washington, and Adler Planetarium that aims to identify star clusters at the captured images of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

The article offers information on citizen science project developed by research student Jonathan Stone and initiated by U.S. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) which aims at creating a disaster risk reduction system by allowing citizens to take aerial photographs of volcanoes.

The article reports that citizen science volunteers are being urged to scan images for gravitational lenses or spacetime distortions caused by high-mass objects like galaxies.

The article offers information on the Andromeda Project citizen science initiative which involves the study and exploration of the Andromeda Galaxy, jointly launched by scientists and web site developers from various universities.

The article mentions that the United Kingdom Space Agency (UKSA) is needing citizen science volunteers for its Milky Way Project.

The author discusses trends and developments concerning citizen science projects particularly the Zooniverse citizen science web portal.