Role of Citizen Science in Northwestern Himalaya: Use Case on Disaster, Bio-resource, and Governance

Abstract

Mountain regions represent most fragile and vulnerable ecosystems (UNCED 1992) facing threats due to unpredictable socioeconomic and climate changes as well as unsustainable land use practices. The impact of unsustainable practices on the mountains is manifested in the form of depletion of bio-resources and increased occurrence of extreme events such as floods, forest fire, landslides, etc. Geospatial technology consisting of remote sensing (RS), geographic information system (GIS), and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) has a huge potential in natural resource management including governance and other environmental issues. Moreover studying the geographic phenomenon requires a large amount of data to be collected/created to model the said phenomenon to improve understanding. Citizen science these days is a valuable and important method, in which nonspecialists also called as volunteers work toward a collection of data of scientific importance in a short span of time using the power of people/volunteers. Citizen science has been globally utilized in areas like support toward policy, electronic government, and digital democracy (Shirky 2008). Citizen science approach is very useful especially in disaster management like during recent earthquake disasters in Haiti, 2010 (Zook et al. 2010), and Nepal, 2015 (Dittus et al. 2017), assisting rescue and relief efforts. With the penetration of the Internet at grassroots levels, the advent of Web 2.0 and the availability of smartphones with good quality camera and onboard GPS receivers have supported and encouraged citizen science initiatives worldwide. These technologies enable volunteers to gather valuable dataset with geolocation (geotagged) including photographs, audio, and videos. In today’s scenario, citizens have a valuable and active role as they work like “sensors” (citizens as sensors (Goodchild 2007)) assisting the state/national administrative or official initiatives through gathering and interpreting datasets. Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is the classic example of citizen science approach in which a huge number of people work as volunteers by building, correcting, and revising the textual material. Likewise in the geospatial field, the popular example is the OpenStreetMap project (www.openstreetmap.org). Here volunteers work as nonspecialists toward mapping of the entire globe. Furthermore data is made available under open-access model.