Contribute to real research on Zooniverse
Classify galaxies, transcribe historical documents, or tag wildlife in camera trap photos — all from your browser. No account required to get started.
Why we picked this
Over 2,000 active projects, no signup required to start, and your classifications feed directly into peer-reviewed research — it's genuinely useful work you can do in ten-minute bursts.
Zooniverse is the world’s largest citizen science platform, hosting over 2,000 research projects that need human eyes to process data that computers still struggle with. Depending on which project you choose, you might be drawing boxes around animals in camera trap footage from the Serengeti, transcribing handwritten letters from World War I, identifying cloud formations in satellite images, or classifying the shapes of distant galaxies. Each task takes a few seconds to a couple of minutes, and your work feeds directly into active scientific research.
No scientific background is required for most projects, and you don’t need to create an account to start — you can jump into many projects as a guest. Creating a free account lets you track your contributions and join project discussions with researchers and other volunteers. The platform is entirely browser-based, so there’s nothing to download. Projects span ecology, astronomy, history, language, medicine, and climate science.
This is a genuinely low-barrier way to contribute to something that matters, whether you have ten minutes or two hours. Browse the project list at zooniverse.org, find something that catches your interest, and start classifying — the tutorial for each project takes about three minutes.