Abstract
Over the past decade, several citizen science projects have been launched, with a smaller subset addressing citizen scientists' involvement in water quality monitoring. Most of these projects were conducted in developed countries and focused on qualitative assessment and measurements of a limited number of water quality parameters. Moreover, data generated by citizen scientists were mainly for monitoring purposes and rarely resulted in remedial measures. In this work, a collaborative citizen science approach involving local citizens and university researchers was applied to assess the groundwater quality in a Lebanese village. Using a mobile laboratory, winter and summer sampling campaigns were conducted and 12 physical, chemical and biological water quality parameters were tested. Results indicated that the data generated by the citizen scientists were comparable with those generated by university researchers for the majority of physical and chemical water quality parameters. However, the bacteriological test results showed a marked difference and may be attributed to the complexity of the testing procedure and quality of testing material. The collaborative and participatory approach resulted in building local capacity and knowledge and in the formation of a locally elected water committee which will be responsible for continuous monitoring of the groundwater resources.
Highlights
The concept of citizen science may have started in the early twentieth century when large amounts of data were generated for the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count [1]
The specific objectives of this work were to (i) assess the interest of citizens in conducting water quality measurements, (ii) instigate a citizen-centric monitoring campaign to determine the quality of groundwater, (iii) compare the values obtained by citizen scientists and experts to assess the accuracy of the results, and (iv) analyse whether this participatory approach will lead to concrete actions in water resource management
After the project introductory presentation, 46 citizens were interested in participating in the project of which 65.2% were adult females and 34.8% were young school students (6th grade); this number dropped to a total of 26 citizens, predominantly women, who participated in the water citizen university researchers pH
Summary
The concept of citizen science may have started in the early twentieth century when large amounts of data were generated for the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count [1]. Over the last two decades, citizen science has seen a sharp rise. Fewer studies have shown the involvement of citizens in the monitoring of water resources [7,8,9]. There are several citizen-based water resource monitoring programmes that have been initiated over the last couple of decades. The literature shows that there were/are several objectives for initiating these programmes and these include to monitor water quality and identify environmental problems [10 –14] to initiate social change and/or legislation [15 –17], and to provide environmental education and awareness [18,19,20,21,22]
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