Abstract
The European-Commission-funded project 'Citclops' (Citizens' observatory for coast and ocean optical monitoring) developed methods, tools and sensors, which can be used by citizens to monitor natural waters, with a strong focus on long-term data series related to environmental sciences. The new sensors, based on optical technologies, respond to a number of scientific, technical and societal objectives, ranging from more precise monitoring of key environmental descriptors of the aquatic environment (water colour, transparency and fluorescence) to an improved management of data collected with citizen participation. The sensors were tested, calibrated, integrated on several platforms, scientifically validated and demonstrated in the field. The new methods and tools were tested in a citizen-science context. The general conclusion is that citizens are valuable contributors in quality and quantity to the objective of collecting, integrating and analysing fragmented and diverse environmental data. An integration of these data into data-analysis tools has a large potential to support authoritative monitoring and decision-making. In this paper, the project's objectives, results, technical achievements and lessons learned are presented.
Highlights
Citizen science is defined as work undertaken by civic educators and scientists together with citizen communities to advance science, foster a broad scientific mentality, and/or encourage democratic engagement, which allows people in society to join the debate about complex modern problems [1]
This tool has been developed as a validation tool for the newly developed Citclops smartphone app, i.e. to validate the FU observation as performed with a smartphone app by comparing the value of FU selected by humans on the mobile-device screen with the value of FU calculated by an algorithm from the digital image
The general conclusion of this research is that citizens are valuable contributors in quality and quantity to the objective of collecting, integrating and analysing large amounts of fragmented and diverse environmental data, to determine the current status and trends of the environment
Summary
Citizen science is defined as work undertaken by civic educators and scientists together with citizen communities to advance science, foster a broad scientific mentality, and/or encourage democratic engagement, which allows people in society to join the debate about complex modern problems [1]. In the European-Commission—funded citizen-science project Citclops (“Citizens’ observatory for coast and ocean optical monitoring”, funded during 2012–2015), about 3000 members of the public partnered with scientists and engineers to solve complex problems through participating in all of the following processes: formulation of questions and experiments; collection and analysis of data; and interpretation, use, and publication of results. Encompassing citizen sensing, community science, and related approaches, Citclops’s citizen science benefited public participants by providing opportunities to learn, addressing questions of concern to the participants and their communities. Two websites and two apps have been created to facilitate this participation, which will be described in detail in the rest of the paper:
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