Citizen science tackles plastics in Ghana

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview with Dilek Fraisl and Omar Seidu by Stephanie Olen: “An estimated 8 million tonnes of plastic waste leaks into the ocean every year, and Ghana generates approximately 1.1 million tonnes of plastics per year. This is due to the substantial economic growth that Ghana has experienced in recent years, as well as the 2.2% population growth annually, which has urged the Ghanaian authorities to act. Ghana was the first African country to join the Global Plastic Action Partnership in 2019. Ghana also has a growing and active citizen science beach clean-up community including one of our project partners, the Smart Nature Freak Youth Volunteers Foundation (SNFYVF).

Before our work, Ghana had no official data available related to marine plastic litter. Based on the data collected through citizen science initiatives in the country and our project ‘Citizen Science for the SDGs in Ghana’ (CS4SDGs), we now know that in 2020 alone more than 152 million plastic items were found along the beaches in the country…

One of the key factors for the success of our project was due to Ghana’s progressive approach to the use of new sources of data for official statistics. For example, the Ghanaian Government passed the new Statistical Service Act in 2019, which mandates the GSS to coordinate statistical information across the whole government system, develop and raise awareness of codes of ethics and practices to produce data, and include new sources of data as a valid input for production of official statistics. This shows that the effective legal arrangements can prepare the groundwork for citizen science data to be used as official statistics and for SDG monitoring and reporting. Political commitment from the partners in Ghana also helped to achieve success. Ultimately, without the support of citizen science and action groups in the country that actually collected the litter and the data on the ground, this project would have never been successful. Since the start, citizen scientists have been willing to work with the government agencies and international partners, as well as other key stakeholders to support our project, which played a significant role in achieving our result…(More)”.

How citizen science can help realize the full potential of data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Haishan Fu, Craig Hammer, and Edward Anderson: “Citizen science, a critical pillar of Open Science, advocates for greater citizen involvement in knowledge generation, research goals, and outcomes. By engaging citizens directly in data collection, drone imaging, and crowdsourcing into project design, we provide policymakers and citizens with valuable data and information they need to make informed and effective decisions.   

Furthermore, abiding by the principles of citizen science, we can help communities establish a new social contract around data stewardship, grounded in the principles of value, trust, and equity, as proposed by the World Development Report 2021: Data for Better Lives. The report puts forward a vision of data governance that is multistakeholder and collaborative. It explicitly builds data production, protection, exchange, and use into planning and decision-making, and integrates participants from civil society, private sectors, and importantly, the public into the data life cycle and into the governance structures of the system. 

As the experience of the Resilience Academy shows, increasing our commitment to citizen science by inviting public engagement before, during, and after development projects can help engage a wider swath of the public with the Bank’s Open Data Initiative.   

The Tanzania-based project empowers students to adapt low-cost, low-complexity tools and open methods to collect and manage data from their changing environments. Resilience Academy students also participate in solving real-world challenges in their community, such as mapping flood- and rockfall-prone zones, surveying tourism and infrastructure needs, and other areas currently lacking critical data. 

This “learning by doing” approach equips young people with the long-term tools, knowledge, and skills they need to address the world’s most pressing urban challenges and ensure resilient urban development. This project is demonstrating the many co-benefits that come from hands-on learning, job creation, and data management-related skills. 

Incorporating citizen science into open data agendas and project design, however, will necessitate some changes to how the World Bank and other multilateral development agencies approach development projects….(More)”.

Community science draws on the power of the crowd

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Amber Dance: “In community science, also called participatory science, non-professionals contribute their time, energy or expertise to research. (The term ‘citizen science’ is also used but can be perceived as excluding non-citizens.)

Whatever name is used, the approach is more popular than ever and even has journals dedicated to it. The number of annual publications mentioning ‘citizen science’ went from 151 in 2015 to more than 640 in 2021, according to the Web of Science database. Researchers from physiologists to palaeontologists to astronomers are finding that harnessing the efforts of ordinary people is often the best route to the answers they seek.

“More and more funding organizations are actually promoting this type of participatory- and citizen-science data gathering,” says Bálint Balázs, managing director of the Environmental Social Science Research Group in Budapest, a non-profit company focusing on socio-economic research for sustainability.

Community science is also a great tool for outreach, and scientists often delight in interactions with amateur researchers. But it’s important to remember that community science is, foremost, a research methodology like any other, with its own requirements in terms of skill and effort.

“To do a good project, it does require an investment in time,” says Darlene Cavalier, founder of SciStarter, an online clearing house that links research-project leaders with volunteers. “It’s not something where you’re just going to throw up a Google form and hope for the best.” Although there are occasions when scientific data are freely and easily available, other projects create significant costs.

No matter what the topic or approach, people skills are crucial: researchers must identify and cultivate a volunteer community and provide regular feedback or rewards. With the right protocols and checks and balances, the quality of volunteer-gathered data often rivals or surpasses that achieved by professionals.

“There is a two-way learning that happens,” says Tina Phillips, assistant director of the Center for Engagement in Science and Nature at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “We all know that science is better when there are more voices, more perspectives.”…(More)”

Collection of Case Studies of Institutional Adoption of Citizen Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About TIME4CS : “The first objective was to increase our knowledge about the actions leading to institutional changes in RPOs (which are necessary to promote CS in science and technology) through a complete and up-to-date picture based upon the identification, mapping, monitoring and analysis of ongoing CS practices. To accomplish this objective, we, the TIME4CS project team, have collected and analysed 37 case studies on the institutional adoption of Citizen Science and Open Science around the world, which this article addresses.

For an organisation to open up and accept data and information that was produced outside it, with a different framework for data collection and quality assurance, there are multiple challenges. These include existing practices and procedures, legal obligations, as well as resistance from within due to framing of such action as a threat. Research that was carried out with multiple international case studies (Haklay et al. 2014; GFDRR 2018), demonstrated the importance of different institutional and funding structures needed to enable such activities and the use of the resulting information…(More)”.

Citizen science in environmental and ecological sciences

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Dilek Fraisl et al: “Citizen science is an increasingly acknowledged approach applied in many scientific domains, and particularly within the environmental and ecological sciences, in which non-professional participants contribute to data collection to advance scientific research. We present contributory citizen science as a valuable method to scientists and practitioners within the environmental and ecological sciences, focusing on the full life cycle of citizen science practice, from design to implementation, evaluation and data management. We highlight key issues in citizen science and how to address them, such as participant engagement and retention, data quality assurance and bias correction, as well as ethical considerations regarding data sharing. We also provide a range of examples to illustrate the diversity of applications, from biodiversity research and land cover assessment to forest health monitoring and marine pollution. The aspects of reproducibility and data sharing are considered, placing citizen science within an encompassing open science perspective. Finally, we discuss its limitations and challenges and present an outlook for the application of citizen science in multiple science domains…(More)”.

See Plastic in a National Park? Log It on This Website for Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Angely Mercado: “You’re hiking through glorious nature when you see it—a dirty, squished plastic water bottle along the trail. Instead of picking it up and impotently cursing the litterer, you can now take another small helpful step—you can report the trash to a new data project that aims to inspire policy change. Environmental nonprofit 5 Gyres is asking national park visitors in the U.S. to log trash they see through a new site called TrashBlitz.

The organization, which is dedicated to reducing plastic pollution, created TrashBlitz to gather data on how much, and what kind, of plastic and other litter is clogging our parks. They want to encourage realistic plastic pollution reduction plans for all 63 national parks.

Once registered on the TrashBlitz website, park visitors can specify the types of trash that they’ve spotted, such as if the discarded item was used for food packaging. According to 5 Gyres, the data will contribute to a report to be published this fall on the top items discarded, the materials, and the brands that have created the most waste across national parks…(More)”.

Citizen science and the potential for mobility policy – Introducing the Bike Barometer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tom Storme et al: “In this paper, we report on a citizen science pilot project involving adolescents who digitize and assess their daily home-to-school routes in different school neighborhoods in Flanders (Belgium). As part of this pilot project, a web-based platform, called the “Bike Barometer” (“Fietsbarometer” in Dutch) was developed. We introduce the tool in this paper and summarize the insights gained from the pilot. From the official launch of the platform in March until the end of the pilot in June 2020, 1,256 adolescents from 31 schools digitized 5657 km of roads, of which 3,750 km were evaluated for cycling friendliness and safety. The added value and potential of citizen science in general and the platform in particular are illustrated. The results offer detailed (spatial) insights into local safety conditions for Flanders and for specific school neighborhoods. The potential for mobility policy is twofold: (i) the cycling friendliness and traffic flows in school environments can be monitored over time and (ii) the platform has the potential to create local ecosystems of adolescents and teachers (both considered citizen scientists here) and policymakers. Two key pitfalls are identified as well: the need for a critical mass of citizen scientists and a minimum level of commitment required from local policymakers. By illustrating the untapped potential of citizen science, we argue that the intersection between citizen science and local policymaking in the domain of mobility deserves much more attention….(More)”.

Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jennifer Gabrys: “Modern environments are awash with pollutants churning through the air, from toxic gases and intensifying carbon to carcinogenic particles and novel viruses. The effects on our bodies and our planet are perilous. Citizens of Worlds is the first thorough study of the increasingly widespread use of digital technologies to monitor and respond to air pollution. It presents practice-based research on working with communities and making sensor toolkits to detect pollution while examining the political subjects, relations, and worlds these technologies generate. Drawing on data from the Citizen Sense research group, which worked with communities in the United States and the United Kingdom to develop digital-sensor toolkits, Jennifer Gabrys argues that citizen-oriented technologies promise positive change but then collide with entrenched and inequitable power structures. She asks: Who or what constitutes a “citizen” in citizen sensing? How do digital sensing technologies enable or constrain environmental citizenship? Spanning three project areas, this study describes collaborations to monitor air pollution from fracking infrastructure, to document emissions in urban environments, and to create air-quality gardens. As these projects show, how people respond to, care for, and struggle to transform environmental conditions informs the political subjects and collectives they become as they strive for more breathable worlds….(More)”.

Citizen power mobilized to fight against mosquito borne diseases

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GigaBlog: “Just out in GigaByte is the latest data release from Mosquito Alert, a citizen science system for investigating and managing disease-carrying mosquitoes, and is part of our WHO-sponsored series on vector borne human diseases. Presenting 13,700 new database records in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) repository, all linked to photographs submitted by citizen volunteers and validated by entomological experts to determine if it provides evidence of the presence of any of the mosquito vectors of top concern in Europe. This is the latest of a new special issue of papers presenting biodiversity data for research on human diseases health, incentivising data sharing to fill important particular species and geographic gaps. As big fans of citizen science (and Mosquito Alert), its great to see this new data showcased in the series.

Vector-borne diseases account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases in humans. There are large gaps in knowledge related to these vectors, and data mobilization campaigns are required to improve data coverage to help research on vector-borne diseases and human health. As part of these efforts, GigaScience Press has partnered with the GBIF; and has been supported by TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, hosted at the World Health Organization. Through this we launched this “Vectors of human disease” thematic series. Incentivising the sharing of this extremely important data, Article Processing Charges have been waived to assist with the global call for novel data. This effort has already led to the release of newly digitised location data for over 600,000 vector specimens observed across the Americas and Europe.

While paying credit to such a large number of volunteers, creating such a large public collection of validated mosquito images allows this dataset to be used to train machine-learning models for vector detection and classification. Sharing the data in this novel manner meant the authors of these papers had to set up a new credit system to evaluate contributions from multiple and diverse collaborators, which included university researchers, entomologists, and other non-academics such as independent researchers and citizen scientists. In the GigaByte paper these are acknowledged through collaborative authorship for the Mosquito Alert Digital Entomology Network and the Mosquito Alert Community…(More)”.

Citizen science and environmental justice: exploring contradictory outcomes through a case study of air quality monitoring in Dublin

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Fiadh Tubridy et al: “Citizen science is advocated as a response to a broad range of contemporary societal and ecological challenges. However, there are widely varying models of citizen science which may either challenge or reinforce existing knowledge paradigms and associated power dynamics. This paper explores different approaches to citizen science in the context of air quality monitoring in terms of their implications for environmental justice. This is achieved through a case study of air quality management in Dublin which focuses on the role of citizen science in this context. The evidence shows that the dominant interpretation of citizen science in Dublin is that it provides a means to promote awareness and behaviour change rather than to generate knowledge and inform new regulations or policies. This is linked to an overall context of technocratic governance and the exclusion of non-experts from decision-making. It is further closely linked to neoliberal governance imperatives to individualise responsibility and promote market-based solutions to environmental challenges. Last, the evidence highlights that this model of citizen science risks compounding inequalities by transferring responsibility and blame for air pollution to those who have limited resources to address it. Overall, the paper highlights the need for critical analysis of the implications of citizen science in different instances and for alternative models of citizen science whereby communities would contribute to setting objectives and determining how their data is used…(More)”.