Zooniverse is a global platform for people-powered research, also known as participatory science or citizen science. It is a collaboration between Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, the University of Oxford, and the University of Minnesota. It is home to some of the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects.
Background The organization grew from the original Galaxy Zoo project and now hosts dozens of projects which allow volunteers to participate in crowdsourced scientific research. It has headquarters at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium. Unlike many early internet-based citizen science projects (such as SETI@home) which used spare computer processing power to analyse data, known as volunteer computing, Zooniverse projects require the active participation of human volunteers to complete research tasks. Projects have been drawn from disciplines including astronomy, ecology, cell biology, humanities, and climate science.
, the Zooniverse community consisted of more than 1 million registered volunteers. By March 2025, the number had risen to over 2.7 million. The volunteers are often collectively referred to as "Zooites". The data collected from the various projects has led to the publication of more than 450 peer-reviewed research publications. A daily news website called 'The Daily Zooniverse' provides information on the different projects under the Zooniverse umbrella, and has a presence on social media.
The founder and former principal investigator (P.I.) of the project, Chris Lintott, published a book called The Crowd & the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse in 2019. In September 2023 the role of P.I. was taken over by Laura Trouille, VP of Science Engagement at the Adler Planetarium, who was co-P.I. for Zooniverse from 2015 to 2023.
Project Builder Zooniverse supports Project Builder, a tool that allows anyone to create their own project by uploading a dataset of images, video files or sound files. In Project Builder a Project Owner creates a workflow for the projects, a tutorial, a field guide and the talk forum of the Project and can add collaborators, researchers and moderators to their project. The moderators for example will have partial administrator rights in the talk, but cannot change anything concerning the workflow.
Zooniverse Mobile App Only certain kinds of projects can be enabled on Zooniverse mobile app (Android & iOS).
Projects
Art projects LogoProjectTypeDescriptionLaunch dateAnnoTateAnnotateVolunteers on Zooniverse can help transcribe/annotate papers from many British artists. This project has over 50,000 documents from the Tate Archive.1 Sep 2015 Scribes of the Cairo GenizaClassifyVolunteers classify old scripts written in Hebrew and Arabic. This helps prepare the scripts for annotation. The second phase of this project is being planned to launch in Spring 2018, which includes annotation. This project was launched by University of Pennsylvania Libraries, the Princeton Geniza Project, the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Genizah at Cambridge University LibraryResearch Unit .8 Aug 2017Criminal CharactersTranscriptionVolunteers help in investigating the criminal careers and life histories of Australian offenders from the end of the convict period through to the Second World War.6 May 2019Davy Notebook ProjectTranscription and FilterationVolunteers help to transcribe the manuscript notebooks of Sir Humphry Davy – one of the most significant and famous figures in the scientific and literary culture of early nineteenth-century Britain, Europe, and America.11 Jul 2019Saint George on a BikeTranscriptionHelp scientists collect data for training an automatic caption generator for European visual art (paintings, prints, etc.) dating from the 12th to the 18th century29 Mar 2022Poets & LoversTranscriptionPoets & Lovers aims to transcribe the diaries and related papers of two major women poets of the fin de siècle, Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper, who published as "Michael Field". Much of this material has only been accessible through archives in the United Kingdom until now. This project made their material freely available to all readers in standards-compliant web and downloadable formats.21 June 2022
Space projects LogoProjectTypeDescriptionLaunch date Galaxy Zoo Decision tree The fourth and latest incarnation of the Galaxy Zoo project, in which users are shown images of a galaxy and then asked a series of questions to classify its morphology. The current sample includes images of high-redshift galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and low-redshift galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico. 12 Jul 2007 Planet Hunters Annotation Identifying extrasolar planets from the light curves of stars recorded by the Kepler space telescope. 16 Dec 2010 Planet Four Annotation Analyze images of the surface of Mars, taken near the Martian southern polar cap. Classifications include marking fans and blotches caused by sublimating gas and geysers underneath the carbon dioxide ice. Images come from the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. 8 Jan 2013 Planet Four: Terrains Filtering Analyze images of the surface of Mars, taken by the low resolution Context camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to identify future targets for the spacecraft's higher resolution HiRISE camera to investigate. 1 July 2015 Radio Meteor ZooAnnotationHelp identify meteors in radio data detected by the Belgian Radio Meteor Stations.12 Aug 2016 Backyard Worlds: Planet 9ClassifyingHelp scan the realm beyond Neptune for brown dwarfs and Planet Nine. Images come from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.15 Feb 2017 SuperWASP Variable Stars FilteringHelp in identifying the most unusual variable stars by classifying light curves recorded by SuperWASP.5 Sep 2018 Zwicky's Quirky TransientsFilteringVolunteers search for rare and unusual transients from data taken by the Zwicky Transient Facility.23 Jan 2019Disk Detective 2.0FilteringSpot the disks around nearby stars where planets form and dwell.2019 Radio Galaxy Zoo: LOFARAnnotationVolunteers help in finding supermassive black holes, starforming galaxies and active galactic nuclei from data gathered by the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope.25 Feb 2020 AI4 MarsAnnotationHelp scientists teach mars rover how to identify martian terrain using artificial intelligence.23 Jun 2020 Burst From SpaceFilteringVolunteers help in finding Fast Radio Bursts from data detected by the CHIME telescope and to train machine learning software to learn to detect such bursts on their own.30 Oct 2020 Citizen ASAS-SNFilteringClassify the light curves of variable stars and help researchers find the most unusual ones.5 Jan 2021 Dark Energy ExplorersFilteringVolunteers identify distant galaxies to help measure dark energy when the universe was just ~2-3 billion years old.23 Feb 2021 Active AsteroidsFilteringExamine images from DECam to find comet-like tails, with the aim being to identify active asteroids. Planet Hunters NGTSFilteringIdentify extrasolar planets by analysing light curves recorded with the Next-Generation Transit Survey.18 Oct 2021 SuperWASP: Black Hole HuntersFilteringFinding black holes by searching for symmetrical peaks in brightness of light curves of stars caused by gravitational microlensing.26 Oct 2021 Bursts from Space: MeerKATFilteringHelp in discovering and identifying compact objects, stellar flares, supernovae and their remnants, kilonovae, fast radio bursts, distant galaxies with active centres and more from data gathered by the MeerKAT telescope.7 Dec 2021 Solar Jet HunterAnnotationStudy images of solar jets, small coronal mass ejections from the Sun, taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory.7 December 2021 Rosetta ZooAnnotationFind changes on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko by analyzing images from the Rosetta spacecraft and to aid understanding of the history of the Solar System.5 May 2022 Jovian Vortex HunterAnnotation/FilteringVolunteers help find interesting cloud features on Jupiter.20 June 2022 Cloudspotting on MarsAnnotationVolunteers search for mesospheric clouds on Mars with data from the Mars Climate Sounder on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.28 June 2022 Gems of the Galaxy ZoosFilteringZoogems was a gap-filler project which used the Hubble Space Telescope to take images of unusual objects found by volunteers classifying data from both Galaxy Zoo (GZ) and Radio Galaxy Zoo (RGZ). It ended in 2023.2 February 2018Gaia VariAnnotation/Filtering Volunteers uncover the secrets of the Universe from the ESA Gaia mission13 June 2022Gravity SpyAnnotation/FilteringVolunteers help scientists at LIGO search for gravitational waves, the elusive ripples of spacetime.9 March 2016Solar Active Region SpotterAnnotation/FilteringStudy the evolution of sunspots to discover new active regions and predict solar eruptions.21 March 2023The Daily Minor PlanetClassifyVolunteers work together to discover new asteroids in daily updated images from the Catalina Sky Survey!2023Kilonova SeekersFilteringVolunteers examine candidates from the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer to identify kilonovae, supernovae, and other transients in real time.11 July 2023AuroraZooClassifyingVolunteers help researchers by examining short 5 second videos of fine-scale aurora from the Auroral Structure and Kinetics (ASK) instrument from Svalbard, to research how energy is transferred from space to Earth's atmosphere.28 April 2020
Nature and climate projects