Participating in Citizen Science

Now I thought I was going to get to introduce this here but I see that Eric beat me to it by mentioning it on the wiki.  My husband is a scientist and also works with non scientists through his volunteer work with Audubon and he turned me onto the idea of "citizen science."  My students have participated in Audubon's Christmas Bird count for several years and eagerly follow and submit data to the Journey North website.   It's great.  It's real and meanigful "work" for students to do and they really dig doing it.  I love the authentic-ness of it and the fact that it isn't a simulation.  The data that they collect and the learning  (both content and process skills)  that they do in the process is connected to their lives and their community.  It helps to prepare them to be thoughtful engaged "citizens" someday.
Poking around this spring for more ideas... since I mostly teach earth science and ecology I stumbled upon scienceforcitizens.net.  Science for Citizens connects students (or just plain you or I) to projects that involve collecting and submitting real scientific data to help solve real scientific problems.  Some projects require analysis and some are pretty straightforward data collection.  Here are a few that I'm thinking my 6th graders could participate in next year: 
Snowtweets
The Quake Catcher Network
Those make sense for Montanan students and I'm also quite taken by What's Invasive! since we already to a project on our city park- a mile high mountain that we can walk to from school- Mt Helena City Park and some terrific folks at the Prickly Pear Land Trust graciously help educate our students on this wonderful resource.