Our educational goal is to provide the means for people to discover what is known and unknown about all living things that they find exploring schoolyards, neighborhoods, parks, and other outdoor areas.

Our scientific goal is to understand the impact of weather and other environmental changes on the distribution and abundance of species at a continental scale.

The challenge is simple -- to photograph more species of insects, spiders, and other arthropods on goldenrods within a county during the flowering season than your competitors.

Rules to be announced soon. Until then, start taking high-resolution jpg images of arthropods on goldenrods.

Please email dl@discoverlife.org or call 706-542-6676 for more information.

The goal of citizen science projects often is to teach rather than to do science per se. Consequently, their data may be of poor quality and little scientific use. Fortunately, this need not be so. We will develop rigorous checks and balances to ensure that sufficient, high-quality, replicated data are collected across sites to be valuable to professional scientists, land managers, and policy makers. Participants will photograph and voucher specimens so that we can verify species identifications, for example. We will use software to cross-check data, rank potential quality, and filter out mistakes and unreliable individuals.

Discover Life includes web tools to submit and database photographs, make barcoded specimen labels, identify species, report findings, make maps, and analyze results. We will provide these services through the website Discover Life and its umbrella organization, The Polistes Foundation.