An overview of citizen science initiatives at the Belgian Federal Scientific Institutions:

• The Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) collects weather observations from citizens through the RMI smartphone app. With this data, they try to better predict very local weather phenomena - such as hail and snow - and send out more accurate warnings. By connecting local weather stations to the WOW-Be platform, citizens can also contribute to scientific research on the Urban Heat Island and validation of weather models. 
• The Royal Observatory of Belgium monitors earthquakes in Belgium. Citizens can help map earthquake impacts through the "Did You Feel an Earthquake?" questionnaire. In addition, small accelerometers or motion sensors are placed in people's homes for the AcceleROB project, to measure the acceleration of ground motion during an earthquake. Finally, citizens can also help identify sunspots on drawings made with the solar telescope in the VAL-U-SUN project. 
• Sciensano, the Belgian health institute, is calling on citizens to report tick bites in the TekenNet project. This way, they want to map the risks of tick bites for people. Through mosquito-surveillance.be, citizens can also help monitor exotic stinging mosquitoes. In addition to these crowdsourcing initiatives, Sciensano is also working on co-creation project, CIVISANO, to address socioeconomic disparities in health-promoting lifestyles, together with specific target groups. 
• The Belgian Insitute for Space Aeronomy also has long experience with citizen science. In the Radio Meteor Zoo project, more than 18,000 volunteers contributed to identifying meteors via the online platform Zooniverse since 2016. 
• The Africamuseum already launched 5 crowdsourcing projects on the DoeDat-platform, where citizens can help transcribe texts to build a virtual collection. Researchers from the Africamuseum are also working with citizens in Africa to monitor tropical parasitic diseases (ATRAP project) and to map natural disasters and their impact (HARISSA project).
• The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences works with citizens from the Nord Seal Team, among others, to monitor marine mammals on the Belgian coast. There are also many citizen scientists who come to the museum to contribute to the entomological collections. These citizen scientists conduct fieldwork, manage the in-house collection and contribute to its digitization. 
• The State Archives of Belgium have been working with more than 150 citizen scientists since 2007 to digitize marriage certificates through DEMOGEN (DEMography & GENealogy). Other projects focus on the digitization of pardon letters (PARDONS), early modern court archives (ACCESS) and prison registers (OUTLAW).