For our September 2023 meeting, the Citizen Science Working Group had a couple of guest speakers. First, Simon Browning from the Rivers Trust introduced us to the Catchment Systems Thinking Cooperative (CaSTCo) project. CaSTCo is creating a radical step change in citizen and community science for evidence-based decision-making in our river catchments. It runs over 3 years, involves 27 partner organisations and is led by the Rivers Trust and United Utilities. The project has been developing a charter for citizen science, a list of accredited methods for citizen science water quality monitoring, protocols for data sharing by local partners and setting up 10 demonstration catchments. A collaborate monitoring plan is being produced for each of these catchments, and each being supported by a volunteer co-ordinator. One of the exciting opportunities is the way that investment in this project is bringing together several other aligned projects, so adding even more value to the investment. The vision is to scale this up across the country and plan for its financial sustainability.
We were also joined by Matthew Fry from the Met Office who gave a presentation on the benefits and challenges of using crowdsourced data to improve weather predictions. Crowdsourced air temperature data for Manchester for 2020 indicated that existing Met Office weather stations around the edges of the city may underestimate maximum temperatures in the central urban area during hot weather. The crowdsourced data was combined with data from the existing Met Office stations to generate gridded data sets that more accurately reflect the true heat island effect of urban areas. They will continue to update these models and upscale these results to other cities, so demonstrating the value of citizen science in providing data at high spatial resolution.
The CSWG is organising a symposium on ‘Inclusivity in Citizen Science’, to be held on Wednesday 29th November 2023 from 10am-1pm. Six speakers have been confirmed so far. Please register and pass on the information.
Update: May 2023
Increasingly UKEOF member organisations are developing more strategic approaches towards citizen science. This has been a welcome shift over the past 2-3 years, compared to the more ad hoc support for citizen science within some of these organisations in the past. One of the benefits of the UKEOF, and in particular the Citizen Science Working Group, is the opportunity to gain feedback on these strategic approaches.
In the Citizen Science Working Group meeting in May, we spent time hearing about and reflecting on the strategic approach developed by Natural England for ‘community science’ in the Natural Capital Ecosystem Assessment. (For this work, they prefer the term ‘community’ rather than ‘citizen’ science.) They will be focussing on piloting ‘regional hubs’ to bring a more collaborative, local focus to citizen science, and they will be developing ‘survey frameworks’ to develop standards, tools and consistent methodologies to support the ‘local’ activities in the regional hubs. There is still much detail to be worked out, but importantly this pilot will be subject to thorough evaluation, so that lessons can be learned and shared. We hope that this will be for the benefit of organisations across the UK.
Of course, citizen science has a distinctive flavour in different countries and different agencies, but often the challenges we have are shared. The CSWG is currently planning for an open symposium on ‘inclusivity’. We are concerned about the importance of inclusivity for its own sake – there is a moral imperative for our volunteer-based monitoring to be inclusive to all, but we think it also has an impact on the quality of our monitoring, and the trust relationships of people towards agencies and environmental evidence. Watch out for further details, but it is preliminarily planned for 29th November. Another challenge that several organisations are facing is how to sustainably maintain data infrastructures and tools (especially smartphone apps). The benefit of the UKEOF CSWG is that these shared challenges can be explored together.