Anecdata.org is a free online platform for citizen and community science created by the MDI Biological Laboratory. It acts as a digital hub where individuals, scientists, and organizations can collaborate to gather, share, and analyze environmental and observational data to support scientific research and conservation efforts.
What is Anecdata For?
The platform is designed to be highly versatile and social, offering distinct pathways for both project organizers and community volunteers:
1. For Scientists and Organizations
- Starting Projects: Using Anecdata’s project creator, any organization or individual can set up a unique project. They decide what specific variables they want to collect, set parameters, and invite their community to participate.
- Gathering Diverse Data: It is highly customizable; projects can be created to track virtually anything, including monitoring water quality, logging bird surveys, tracking trees, or cataloging beach trash. For example, the “EwA Buggy” project in the Greater Boston Area uses the platform to document insect-plant interactions for biodiversity and climate studies.
- Advanced Data Analysis: Organizers can utilize powerful built-in tools to generate plots and graphs. For deeper statistical work, Anecdata provides an integrated R programming environment called Anecdata DataLab.
- Downloading Datasets: Project managers can easily moderate observations, leave comments, and download the entire collected dataset as a spreadsheet for external research.
2. For Community Members & Citizen Scientists
- Discovering Projects: Users can search the platform to find and join local or global community science projects that match their environmental interests.
- Logging Observations: Volunteers can upload photos and record their observations directly from the field using Anecdata’s free mobile app for iOS and Android, or submit them later via the web.
- Viewing Community Contributions: Contributors can instantly see the collective dataset grow in real-time, gaining immediate access to the broader map of observations logged by their peers.
- Interacting Socially: The platform allows users to favorite, comment on, and “like” observations, facilitating discussions about species identification and enabling easy sharing to other social media networks.