This series looks at the Oxford Martin School's academics and how their research is making a difference to our global future. The series will be of interest to people who are concerned about the future for the planet, how civilisation will adapt to emerging problems and issues such as climate change, over population, increased urbanisation of populations and the creation of vaccines to fight against future pandemics. The Oxford Martin School academics explain their various research topics in an accessible and thoughtful way and try to find practical solutions to these issues.

This site is a gateway to projects involving public participants in real-world research, with hopes of fostering connections for sharing ideas and resources.

Students learn that ordinary citizens, including students like themselves, can make meaningful contributions to science through the concept of "citizen science." First, students learn some examples of ongoing citizen science projects that are common around the world, such as medical research, medication testing and donating idle computer time to perform scientific calculations. Then they explore Zooniverse, an interactive website that shows how research in areas from marine biology to astronomy leverage the power of the Internet to use the assistance of non-scientists to classify large amounts of data that is unclassifiable by machines for various reasons. To conclude, student groups act as engineering teams to brainstorm projects ideas for their own town that could benefit from community help, then design conceptual interactive websites that could organize and support the projects.

Roughly one hundred billion galaxies are scattered throughout our observable Universe, each a glorious system that might contain billions of stars. Many are remarkably beautiful, and the aim of Galaxy Zoo is to study them, assisting astronomers in attempting to understand how the galaxies we see around us formed, and what their stories can tell us about the past, present and future of our Universe as a whole. Are you an educator? Would you like to use Galaxy Zoo with a group of students? The Navigator is an interactive tool that allows groups to classify galaxies together and then investigate galaxy characteristics. Zoo Teach is where educators can share lessons, resources and that compliment the citizen science projects that are part of the Zooniverse.

Students participate in a global campaign to observe and record the faintest visible stars as a means of measuring light pollution in a given location. By locating and observing the constellation Orion in the night sky and comparing it to stellar charts, students from around the world will learn how the artificial lighting in their community contribute to light pollution. Student contributions to the online database will document the visible night time sky.

Journey North engages students in a global study of wildlife migration and seasonal change. K-12 students become involved in citizen science and share their own field observations with classmates across North America. They track the coming of the seasons through the migration patterns of monarch butterflies, robins, hummingbirds, whooping cranes, gray whales, bald eagles— and other birds and mammals; the budding of plants; changing sunlight; and other natural events. Find migration maps, pictures, standards-based lesson plans, activities and information to help students make local observations and fit them into a global context.

This article provides an overview of scientific inquiry and how citizen science programs run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology provide opportunities for inquiry about birds.

Measure and Map Our Galaxy: The Milky Way Project needs your help looking through tens of thousands of images from the Spitzer Space Telescope. By telling us what you see in this infrared data, we can better understand how stars form. The scale of this project necessitates group participation. We need the help of the public to classify the thousands of images we have on file. If all 900,000 Zooniverse members classified a few images, this project would be done in no time!

The goal of the Moon Zoo website is "to provide detailed crater counts for as much of the Moon's surface as possible." On the website, interested parties can help out with this effort by examining images of the moon's surface and providing feedback to be used by the team of researchers in charge of the Moon Zoo project. First-time visitors should click on the "How To Take Part" for a tutorial that will help determine which project they might be best suited for. Visitors who wish to take part in the project will need to register on the website, and that process only takes a few minutes. Moving on, the website has an online forum where users can trade information as well as a blog.

Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

On December 16, 2010, the Zooniverse launched the original Planet Hunters to enlist the public's help to search data from the NASA's Kepler spacecraft for the characteristic drop in light due to an orbiting extrasolar planets (exoplanets) crossing in front of their parent stars. Back then we didn't know what we would find. The project was a gamble on the ability of human pattern recognition to beat machines just occasionally and spot the telltale dip from a transiting planet that was missed by automated routines looking for repeating patterns. It may have been the case that no new planets were discovered and that computers had the job down to a fine art. The gamble paid off. The original Planet Hunters project discovered a bounty of unknown planet candidates and several confirmed planets, resulting from the efforts of nearly 300,000 volunteers worldwide.

The goals of the International OER Exchange Pilot project are to: facilitate the development and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) by teachers and students globally, track the development and use of the science learning materials and data collection, especially around climate change study, created in the project through OER Commons, and highlight the process and results through workshops and conference presentations.The broader purpose of the project is to support the international exchange of information and understanding through freely available resources among teachers and students, especially in the area of environmental science and climate change investigation.

Project Budburst is a national network of people monitoring plants as the seasons change. Data is collected in a consistent manner across the country so that scientists can learn more about the responsiveness of plant species to changes in climate locally, regionally, and nationally. The website includes extensive educational resources for implementing the project within various classroom and informal settings.

This article discusses Project FeederWatch, a real-time citizen science project, and how elementary teachers can use this bird data to integrate math lessons and concepts.

Project Noah is a tool to explore and document wildlife and a platform to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere.

Solar scientists need you! Help them spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth. Your work will give astronauts an early warning if dangerous solar radiation is headed their way. And you could make a new scientific discovery.

In this project, students will assume the role of citizen scientists—helping researchers answer questions about how dandelions acquire beneficial symbiotic microbes from different soil types. Students will collect and transplant dandelions, conduct experiments on dandelion growth and microbe growth, and then submit data to scientists at the Genomics and Microbiology Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The researchers will use these data to supplement DNA and RNA sequencing efforts. Students will receive results from the genetic analyses from a limited set of classrooms whose dandelions had previously been sequenced. By maintaining a connection with researchers, students will have an active, hands-on role in current science. Besides aiding scientists with research, students will also create their own inquiries.