Whoa! We reached 300,000 classifications today! I saw the classification number creep up there earlier this week but didn’t get a chance to write a blog post about pushing the classifications up to 300,000. But YOU DID IT!

Who are the folks who made 300,000 classifications? To explain this we made a treemap to show the number of classifications that each person has made. We borrowed this idea from Margaret Kosmala of Snapshot Serengeti and Philip Brohan of Old Weather, who have created similar graphics for their projects.

In this graphic, each box represents one user, except for the users who were not logged in (those were all grouped together). We have over 2600 registered users on this site! And the size of the box reflects the number of classifications. Can you find yourself in this graphic?

What you’ll see here is that unlike some other projects (e.g. Snapshot Serengeti), our top 2-3 classifiers have done many more classifications than all the non-logged-in users combined! It’s interesting to us — because while Plankton might not have a very broad appeal to the general public, there are some people — YOU — who love this project so much that they dedicate a lot of time to it. You help carry this project along, and in the process, you become our ambassadors to your schools, communities, and cities. It’s quite amazing.

To that end, I’d like to thank our top 10 citizen scientists:

1. yshish *
2. elizabeth *
3. Siiw *
4. CindyLou
5. phf13
6. lynb
7. charcinders
8. VBear
9. mlmuniz
10. starburst42

Our next 10 top classifiers are: Ingolme, Valraukar, Jurel, KarenLK, cnorvalk, lekape, scopedriver, SandersClan, Rebecca_W, and localwormguy. Those whose names are marked with an asterisk (*) also help moderate the discussion boards – give a round of applause to them!

For our top classifiers and everyone who has participated in Plankton Portal, we thank you! Our friendly mascot, Solmaris, is offering free hugs:

We hope that you all have enjoyed your time on this site – we have certainly enjoyed interacting with all of you on the discussion boards! It’s been very fun getting people all around the world involved in this project. Here’s to 300,000 more!

P.S. Also a huge congratulations to Zooniverse for being awarded a $1.8 million Google Global Impacts Award!