Citizen Science and Citizens’ Observatories: Trends, Roles, Challenges and Development Needs for Science and Environmental Governance

Abstract

This chapter explores growing and important trends within citizen sensing, especially those linked to major initiatives that form citizens' observatories and address novel ways to engage citizens in science and environmental policymaking. On the basis of providing an overview of existing and planned citizen science and citizens' observatories programmes, this chapter identifies areas where citizen science and citizens' observatories have actively contributed to, and can be expected to see further development in, the formation of various policies in Europe. Furthermore, this chapter considers the motivations for developing citizen science and citizens' observatories and how these initiatives can contribute to awareness raising and decision support systems. We address key challenges and development needs for policy-and decision-making within the context of widespread and accessible citizen science and of the activities of citizen observatories.

Onto new horizons: insights from the WeObserve project to strengthen the awareness, acceptability and sustainability of Citizen Observatories in Europe

“…Bonney et al, 2009]. In another comprehensive treatment of the CO concept and CO projects existing at the time, Liu, Grossberndt and Kobernus [2017] propose a common model for COs. It builds on procedural aspects of realising a CO including the identification of citizens' needs and interests; citizen engagement; tool development for monitoring (data gathering) and decision-making (data interpretation); citizen and stakeholder networks; as well as the underlying ICT infrastructure.…”

Transformative Potential and Learning Outcomes of Air Quality Citizen Science Projects in High Schools Using Low-Cost Sensors

“…In this paper, we evaluate the learning outcomes from the use of low-cost air quality sensor systems in citizen science activities in high schools. Low-cost sensor systems have the advantage that they are small, easy to handle, and comparably cheap devices for measuring air pollution levels, offering real-time information to their users [10,11]. For this study we selected the air quality sensor Nova SDS011 for particulate matter (PM), which has been previously evaluated in the scientific literature and shown a good agreement when compared against reference data (e.g., [12]).…”