Displays

The contribution of citizen science to addressing societal challenges has long been recognized. The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as an overarching policy framework and a roadmap to guide global development efforts until 2030 for achieving a better future for all, could benefit from the potential that citizen science offers. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the value of citizen science, particularly in addressing the data needs for SDG monitoring, among the UN agencies, national statistical offices, policy makers and the citizen science community itself. To address this challenge, we launched a Community of Practice on Citizen Science and the SDGs (SDGs CoP) in November 2018 as part of the EU Horizon 2020 funded WeObserve project.

The SDGs CoP brings together citizen science researchers, practitioners, UN custodian agencies, broader data communities and other key actors to develop an understanding on how to demonstrate the value of citizen science for SDG achievement. The initial focus and the main objective of the SDGs CoP has been to conduct a research study to understand the contribution of citizen science to SDG monitoring and implementation. In this talk, we will present the work of the SDGs CoP. We will first discuss existing data gaps and needs for measuring progress on the SDGs, and then provide an overview on the results of a systematic review that we undertook within the CoP, showing where citizen science is already contributing and could contribute data to the SDG framework. We will provide concrete examples of our findings to demonstrate how citizen science data could inform the SDGs. We will also touch on the challenges for and barriers to the uptake of citizen science data for the SDG monitoring processes, and how to bring this source of data into the scope of official statistics.

How to cite: Fraisl, D., Campbell, J., See, L., Wehn, U., Wardlaw, J., Gold, M., Moorthy, I., Arias, R., Piera, J., L. Oliver, J., Maso, J., Penker, M., and Fritz, S.: The Potential Role of Citizen Science for Addressing Global Challenges and Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-7453, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-7453, 2020.

Data contributed by citizen scientists raise increasing interest in many areas of scientific research. Increasingly, projects rely on information technology such as mobile applications (apps) to facilitate data collection activities by lay people. When developing such smartphone apps, it is essential to account for both the requirements of the scientists interested in acquiring data and the needs of the citizen scientists contributing data. Citizens and participating scientists should therefore ideally work together during the conception, design and testing of mobile applications used in a citizen science project. This will benefit both sides, as both scientists and citizens can bring in their expectations, desires, knowledge, and commitment early on, thereby making better use of the potential of citizen science. Such processes of app co-design are highly transdisciplinary, and thus pose challenges in terms of the diversity of interests, skills, and background knowledge involved.

Our “Nachtlicht-BüHNE” citizen science project addresses these issues. Its major goal is the development of a co-design process enabling scientists and citizens to jointly develop citizen science projects based on smartphone apps. This includes (1) the conception and development of a mobile application for a specific scientific purpose, (2) the design, planning and organization of field campaigns using the mobile application, and (3) the evaluation of the approach. In Nachtlicht-BüHNE, the co-design approach is developed within the scope of two parallel pilot studies in the environmental and space sciences. Case study 1 deals with the problem of light pollution. Currently, little is known about how much different light source types contribute to emissions from Earth. Within the project, citizens and researchers will develop and use an app to capture information about all types of light sources visible from public streets. Case study 2 focuses on meteors. They are of great scientific interest because their pathways and traces of light can be used to derive dynamic and physical properties of comets and asteroids. Since the surveillance of the sky with cameras is usually incomplete, reports of fireball sightings are important. Within the project, citizens and scientists will create and use the first German-language app that allows reporting meteor sightings.

We will share our experiences on how researchers and communities of citizen scientists with backgrounds in the geosciences, space research, the social sciences, computer science and other disciplines work together in the Nachtlicht-BüHNE project to co-design mobile applications. We highlight challenges that arose and present different strategies for co-design that evolved within the project accounting for the specific needs and interests of the communities involved.

How to cite: Klan, F., Kyba, C. C. M., Schulte-Römer, N., Kuechly, H. U., Oberst, J., and Margonis, A.: Co-Designing Mobile Applications for Data Collection in Citizen Science Projects – Challenges and Lessons Learned within the Nachtlicht-BüHNE Project, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-18606, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-18606, 2020.

Geospatial technologies and data are multipurpose and valuable, that can initiate and contribute to different scientific researches. The rapid scientific and technological developments in this field lead to new research areas. In order to discuss the nature, quantity, quality, accuracy or infrastructure of geospatial data, they must be obtained first. To collect geospatial data, appropriate sensors and professional users are often in charge. However, with wide use of mobile devices with coordinate measurement capability (i.e. GNSS receivers), accessibility to freely available remote sensing data and maps, and web map applications, non-professionals are becoming more capable to collect and interpret geospatial data and thus contribute to this domain under various terms such as volunteered geographical information (VGI), participatory geographical information, etc.

Citizen science (CitSci) refers to the participation of individuals in scientific studies regardless of their research background. CitSci has important potential for geoscience researches that need massive and timely geospatial data. Considering the fact that almost every person can access Internet,  online CitSci repositories where geospatial data are collected, analyzed and reported are good options for utilizing the potential of CitSci since they can provide platform independency for web and mobile apps with the sole requirement of data connection.

GeoCitSci is a freely accessible geospatial CitSci repository with a WebGIS interface and a mobile application (LaMA). The platform was initially developed to contribute the landslide researchers. The LaMA app and GeoCitSci helps volunteers to upload images and their observations on landslides, such as damages. The system can be adapted to different types of hazards, such as earthquakes. In addition to the mobile app, a web map interface that allows data upload is also implemented. A geodatabase running on the server complements the system by storing the collected data together with a landslide analysis mechanism from photos to ensure high quality content. Such a mechanism that checks the quality of the data provided by the participants is an indispensable part of CitSci repositories. 

Since the nature of CitSci methods addresses the volunteers with different knowledge, experience and perspectives, a simple and responsive interface with highly understandable design that can be easily used by all participants is considered in the system implementation with an in-site navigation approach. The web map edit service is developed for those who do not have a smartphone with location feature or  have no Internet access. Images obtained from the participants have great importance in order to analyze the landslides. A deep learning architecture has been developed and integrated to the application, which automatically detects and classifies the images whether the image contains landslides or not. The developed deep learning architecture overcome controlling data quality problem which is very important in CitSci projects and eliminate the manual labor. The system is currently being adapted for earthquake researches for the purpose of disaster mitigation and management; and to flood mapping in order to support public safety and reduce the risks and losses.  

How to cite: Can, R., Kocaman, S., and Gokceoglu, C.: Geocitsci.com: A citsci platform for geological hazards, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-4964, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-4964, 2020.

Changes in the rhythm of nature are recognized as a useful proxy for detecting climate change and a very interesting source of data for scientists investigating its effects on the natural ecosystems. In this sense, phenology is the science that observes and studies the phases of the life cycling of living organisms and how the seasonal and interannual variations of climate affect them.

Traditionally, farmers or naturalists and scientists recorded phenological observations on paper for decades. Most of these observations correspond to practices today associated to Citizen Science. So far, in-situ observations were reduced to small traditional specimens closely located to the observer home, such as garden plants or fruit trees, butterflies, swallows or storks and, in general, the volunteers efforts were a bit biased towards accessible locations (close to the roads or urban areas). However, the strong variability of the vegetation phenology across biomes requires having more data to improve the knowledge about these changes. Despite its limitations, local, regional or national networks are dedicated to the collection of evidences on changes of vegetation phenology. At sub-national level in Catalonia (north-east of the Iberian Peninsula), the Catalan weather service deployed the FenoCat initiative and in the H2020 Groundtruth 2.0 project, RitmeNatura.cat (www.ritmenatura.cat) was co-designed as a phenological Citizen Observatory that has a community of phenology observers collecting either occasional or regular observations. It monitors 12 species and provides observers with species-phenophase guidance. Fortunately, scientists have found another ally to increase the collection of vegetation phenology data at global level: remote sensing.

Remote Sensing (RS) provides several products with different spatial and spectral resolutions. MODIS with a daily revisit is ideal for detecting phenology in vegetation but in many areas of the world, a spatial resolution of 250 m (MODIS) is too coarse to account for small heterogeneous landscapes. In the other extreme high resolution imagery such as Landsat has a limited temporal resolution of only two revisiting periods per month being too low to generate a regular (and dense enough) time series once cloud cover is masked. Sentinel 2A and B with higher resolution, global coverage and 5 days temporal revisiting offer a good compromise. Still, what was obtainable from space differs methodologically from the in-situ observations and both are hardly comparable. The PhenoTandem Project (http://www.ritmenatura.cat/projects/phenotandem/index-eng.htm), part of the CSEOL initiative funded by ESA, provides an innovation consisting in co-designing a new protocol with citizen scientists that will make in-situ observations interoperate with remote sensing products by selecting the areas and habitats where traditional phenological in-situ observations done by volunteers can be also be observed in Sentinel 2 imagery

And so harmonizing citizens’ science and remote sensing observations promoted through observatories ensures a promising partnership for phenology monitoring.

How to cite: Domingo-Marimon, C., Prat, E., Guzmán, P., Zabala, A., and Masó, J.: Remote sensing and citizen science observatories: a promising partnership for phenology monitoring, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-18119, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-18119, 2020.

Environmental monitoring is based on time-series of data collected over long periods of time from expensive and hard to maintain in-situ sensors available only in specific areas. Due to the climate change it is important to monitor extended areas of interest. This need has raised the question of whether such monitoring can be complemented or replaced by Citizen Science.

Crowdsourced measurements from low-cost and easy to use portable sensors and devices can facilitate the collection of the needed information with the support of volunteers, enabling the monitoring of environmental ecosystems and extended areas of interest. In particular, during the last years there has been a rapid increase of citizen-generated knowledge that has been facilitated by the wider use of mobile devices and low-cost portable sensors. To enable their easy integration to existing models and systems as well as their utilisation in the context of new applications, citizen science data should be easily discoverable, re-usable, accessible and available for future use.

The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) offers a single access point to Earth Observation data (GEOSS Portal), connecting users to various environmental monitoring systems around the world while promoting the use of common technical standards to support their utilisation. 

Such a connection was demonstrated in the context of SCENT project. SCENT is a EU project which has implemented an integrated toolbox of smart collaborative and innovating technologies that allows volunteers to collect environmental measurements as part of their everyday activities.

These measurements may include images that include information about the land cover and land use of the area, air temperature and soil moisture measurements from low-cost portable environmental sensors or river measurements, water level and water velocity extracted from multimedia, images and video, through dedicated tools.

The collected measurements are provided to policy makers and scientists to facilitate the decision making regarding needed actions and infrastructure improvements as well as the monitoring of environmental phenomena like floods through the crowdsourced information.

In order to ensure that the provided measurements are of high quality, a dedicated control mechanism has been implemented that uses a custom mechanism, based on spatial and temporal clustering, to identify biased or low quality contributions and remove them from the system.

Finally, recognising the importance of making the collected data available all the validated measurements are modelled, stored and provisioned using the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Map Service (WMS) as applicable.

This allows the spatial and temporal discovery of information among the collected measurements, encourages their re-usability and allows their integration to systems and platforms utilizing the same standards. The data collected by the SCENT Campaigns organized at the Kifisos river basin and the Danube Delta can be found at the GEOSS portal under the WFS here https://www.geoportal.org/?f:sources=wfsscentID and under the WMS here https://www.geoportal.org/?f:sources=wmsSCENTID.  

This activity is showcased as part of WeObserve project that has received funding from the European Union’ s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 776740.

How to cite: Tsiakos, V., Krommyda, M., Tsertou, A., and Amditis, A.: From crowdsourcing environmental measurements to their integration in the GEOSS portal, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-21328, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21328, 2020.

The development of new infrastructure (such as wind farms) often faces opposition from local citizens and other stakeholders due to concerns over the trade-off between cultural and provisioning services. PPGIS (Public Participatory Geographic Information Science) can be used to collect areas of conflict, as well as obtain qualitative data on existing or proposed infrastructure and therefore minimise disruption at later stages of the planning process. Despite PPGIS being designed to increase democracy in the decision making process, the tools to do so are often lacking. This can result in the data collected being ignored or misinterpreted as it fails to adequately represent the views of citizens as well as the exclusion of certain parties due to digital divides. One way in which current tools are lacking is in the un-critical use of spatial primitives such as points and polygons. They dominate PPGIS tools yet can, in some circumstances, offer a poor representation of the complex relationships between people and place. This research explores three ways in which citizens’ views might be better represented by using alternative PPGIS interfaces. User surveys and interviews were carried out through a case study on the isles of Barra and Vatersay, Outer Hebrides, UK.

Firstly, we address the challenge of generalisation in line-based PPGIS by asking participants where they would like to see new footpaths. It replaces the traditional line digitisation model with one in which user-generated ‘anchor points’ are joined not with straight edges, but rather with least cost paths. This approach means that the level of generalisation of each line is standardised, based upon the resolution of the underlying elevation data. The standardised level of generalisation also means that similar inputs will follow the same route, avoiding the need for path bundling, which can draw results away from their intended location. As such, realistic and representative outputs can be produced with minimal effort required of the participant. Secondly, we use viewsheds as a spatial unit, drawn in real-time when the user clicks on the map. Participants are asked to click on locations from which they would not wish to be able to see a turbine (e.g. their house), and the map will then be populated with a viewshed delineating the areas in which a turbine could not therefore be placed. This approach is therefore able to better reflect how citizens would experience the installation in real life, rather than simply adding points at locations that they believe to be suitable or unsuitable without any contextual information. Finally, we consider the same questions again, but this time using a paper-based interface instead of the digital. This enables an assessment of how a non-digital PPGIS interface might influence participant accessibility and subsequent analysis.

We present preliminary results, and explore how alternative spatial units and interfaces might permit researchers to gain greater insight into participants’ spatial thoughts and feelings for more inclusive and representative environmental decision-making.

How to cite: Denwood, T., Huck, J., and Lindley, S.: Alternative Interfaces for Improved Representation and Cultural Inclusion in Web-Based PPGIS, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-7310, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-7310, 2020.

The concept of using open data in development planning and resilience building to frequent environmental hazards has gained substantial momentum in recent years. It is helpful in better understanding local capacities and associated risks to develop appropriate risk reduction strategies. Currently, lack of accurate and sufficient data has contributed to increased environmental risks, preventing local planners the opportunity to consider these risks in advance. To fulfil this gap, this study presents an innovative approach of using openly available platforms to map locally available resources and associated risks in two remote communities of Nepal. The study also highlights the possibility of using the combined knowledge of technical persons and citizen scientists to collect geo-spatial data to support proper decision making. We harnessed the power of citizen scientists to collect geo-spatial data by training them on currently available tools and platforms. Also, we equipped these communities with the necessary instruments to collect location based data. Later, these data collected by citizen scientists were uploaded in the online platforms. The collected data are freely accessible to community members, government and humanitarian actors which could be used for development planning and risk reduction. Moreover, the information co-generated by local communities and scientists could be crucial for local government bodies to plan activities related to disaster risk reduction. Through the piloting in two communities of Nepal, we have found that using open data platforms for collecting and analysing location based data has a mutual benefit to researchers and communities. These data could be vital in understanding the local landscape of development, environmental risk and distribution of resources. Furthermore, it enables both researchers and local people to transfer the technical knowledge, collect location specific data and use them in better decision making.

How to cite: Parajuli, B. P., Shakya, P., Khadka, P., Liu, W., and Pudasaini, U.: Open data in building resilience to recurrent natural hazards in remote mountainous communities of Nepal , EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-4761, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-4761, 2020.

Almost 6 years ago, the now Center for Earth Observation and Citizen Science (EOCS) at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) pioneered a crowdsourcing mobile app that allowed citizens to report land use and land cover at specific locations across Austria. The app is called FotoQuest Austria (and FotoQuest Go Europe when extended outside of Austria) and uses the GPS capabilities of mobile phones to allow citizens to visit locations near to them and then provide information on various land-related characteristics. A subset of the locations in FotoQuest Austria matched those used in the three-yearly Land Use and Coverage Area frame Survey (LUCAS) from Eurostat. The interface was developed to mimic part of the same protocol that LUCAS surveyors use when visiting locations across Europe, but in this case allowing any citizen to record land use and land cover characteristics observed at these locations. Over a period of 4 years, the FotoQuest project continued to improve: In the 2015 FotoQuest Austria version, 76 citizens collected data at over 600 LUCAS locations, although only 300 were used for comparison, mostly due to quality reasons (Laso Bayas et al. 2016). In the 2018 FotoQuest Go Europe campaign, 140 users from 18 different countries visited 1600 locations, with almost 1400 being currently used for analysis. Apart from the increased number of countries and locations, the user interface, experience and interaction with the app was continuously enhanced. Although LUCAS happened only twice in this period (2015 and 2018), FotoQuest had 3 official campaigns, which allowed us to introduce improvements in each campaign, but it also enabled citizens to continue providing land use change information in between campaigns. In 2015, the agreement between the main land cover classes in LUCAS and FotoQuest Austria was 69% whereas in the 2018 FotoQuest Go Europe campaign, it was over 90%. Currently, data from all campaigns are being compiled and will be freely available through the Geo-Wiki open platform (www.geo-wiki.org). The current presentation will describe the development of the FotoQuest project, as an example of a citizen science project that provides open data, including engagement strategies, improvements to the user interface and experience, and the lessons learnt from the uptake and the match of the crowdsourced data against the official LUCAS results. We hope the lessons we have learned during the project can help other citizen science projects share their data more openly and increase citizen participation.

Related publication:
Laso Bayas, J C, L See, S Fritz, T Sturn, C Perger, M Dürauer, M Karner, et al. 2016. “Crowdsourcing In-Situ Data on Land Cover and Land Use Using Gamification and Mobile Technology.” Remote Sensing 8 (11): e905. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs8110905.

How to cite: Laso Bayas, J. C., See, L., Sturn, T., Karner, M., Fraisl, D., Moorthy, I., Subash, A., Georgieva, I., Hager, G., Lesiv, M., Hadi, H., Danylo, O., Karanam, S., Dürauer, M., Dahlia, D., Shchepashchenko, D., McCallum, I., and Fritz, S.: Monitoring of land use change by citizens: The FotoQuest experience, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-7870, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-7870, 2020.

Soil moisture is a crucial factor for agricultural activity, but also an important factor for weather forecast and climate science. Despite of the technological development in soil moisture sensing, no full coverage global or continental or even national scale soil moisture monitoring system exist.  There is a new European initiative to demonstrate the feasibility of a citizen observatory based soil moisture monitoring system.  The aim of this study is to characterize this new monitoring approach and provide provisional results on the interpretation and system performance.

GROW Observatory is a project funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. Its aim is to establish a large scale (>20,000 participants), resilient and integrated ‘Citizen Observatory’ (CO) and community for environmental monitoring that is self-sustaining beyond the life of the project. This article describes how the initial framework and tools were developed to evolve, bring together and train such a community; raising interest, engaging participants, and educating to support reliable observations, measurements and documentation, and considerations with a special focus on the reliability of the resulting dataset for scientific purposes. The scientific purposes of GROW observatory are to test the data quality and the spatial representativity of a citizen engagement driven spatial distribution as reliably inputs for soil moisture monitoring and   to create timely series of  gridded soil moisture products based on citizens’ observations using low cost soil moisture (SM) sensors, and to provide an extensive dataset of in-situ soil moisture observations which can serve as a reference to validate satellite-based SM products and support the Copernicus in-situ component. This article aims to showcase the design, tools and the digital soil mapping approaches of the final soil moisture product.

How to cite: Dobos, E., Kovács, K., Kibirige, D., and Vadnai, P.: Estimation of soil moisture content using Citizen observatory data -lessons learnt from GROW Observatory project, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-7613, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-7613, 2020.

With the Tea Bag Index (TBI) App, we aim to foster awareness of the importance of soils and their ecosystem services to students above the age of 10. The TBI app consists of three categories of hands-on activities: Basic soil attributes, Soil observations, and Tea Bag Index. Basic soil attributes include land use, soil colour and soil life, whereas soil observations go further to Texture by Feel, Spade Test and observation of soil pollution. The Tea Bag Index (Keuskamp et al., 2013) provides an easy and scientifically recognized way to measure decomposition rates and stabilisation of organic matter in soils. The method consists of burying tea bags and measuring the degradation of organic material after three months’ time. Each of the methods includes clear instructions and extra information in the app. Data gathered are interactively shown on a map in the App as well as online. Hence, students are encouraged to gain hands-on science experience and to witness how science connects across regions, countries and cultures. By using playful tools such as rewards, badges and a point system, we attract and maintain the interest of students. Social media channels are used to exchange and share their results as well as to reach teachers and citizen scientists in order to inspire them to use the educational App.

Having this awareness on soil and its functions, citizen scientists can make valuable contributions to the sustainable use of soils. They also have the opportunity to participate in a global scientific initiative, acquire skills in conducting a scientific experiment and gain knowledge on soil functions. The science community, on the other hand, increases its understanding of factors influencing decomposition (and associated soil functions) at different times and in different places globally.

Moreover, the TBI App can be used for „Content Language Integrated Lessons“ (CLIL), which is the use of a foreign language for the integrative teaching of content and language competence outside of language teaching in agricultural schools in Austria. Individual learning outcomes (ILOs) of an agricultural school class testing the TBI App were evaluated in an online questionnaire. Results showed high appreciation of activities offered by the TBI App and high motivation of students to contribute to science.

Keuskamp, J.A., Dingemans, B.J.J., Lehtinen, T., Sarneel, J.M. and Hefting, M.M. (2013), Tea Bag Index: a novel approach to collect uniform decomposition data across ecosystems. Methods Ecol Evol, 4: 1070-1075. doi:10.1111/2041-210X.12097

How to cite: Miloczki, J., Wawra, A., Gansberger, M., Hummer, P., and Sandén, T.: TeaTime4App – Raising awareness about the role of soils with the educational “Tea Bag Index App”, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-3068, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-3068, 2020.

Beach monitoring plays a fundamental role both for the knowledge of coastal morphodynamics and to assess the risk of coastal flooding. This an very relevant topic for areas in which economies are based on coastal activities like maritime transport or coastal tourim. Unfortunately, up to now the instrumentation and the means required to carry out such monitoring involve very high costs. In consequence, only a limited number of beaches can be studied in detail.

One of the main objectives of the European project SOCLIMPACT is to quantitatively assess the loss of beach surface in the European islands due to projected climate change under different emission scenarios. The main handicap of that activity is to gather accurate information of beach characteristics (topography, bathymetry, granulometry). In order to sort out that problem, the SECOSTA citizen science project has been launched with the support of the Balearic Islands regional government.

In the SECOSTA project, low cost instrumentation based on ARDUINO technology has been developed to measure both the topography and the bathymetry of the beaches. Then, an educational programme has been launched in secondary schools to teach the students to build those instruments and to perform several observational campaigns to characterize sandy beaches along the Balearic Islands. In summary, more than 20 different secondary schools have participated involving more than 2000 students in the construction of devices, acquisition and processing of data. The results have then used as the observational basis for a scientific study about projections of beach retreat in the European islands. Also, both the educational programme and the scientific results have received a broad coverage in the media. With this project, different sectors of citizenship (high school students, teachers, technicians, local government, press etc.,) are directly involved addressing one of the major challenges our society is facing (i.e. sea level rise impacts).  The same approach could  be translated to other fields developing suitable instrumentation.

How to cite: Jordà, G., Agulles, M., Tomàs-Ferrer, J., and Puigdefabregas, J.: The SECOSTA Project. Citizen science to monitor beach topography with low cost instruments, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-9023, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-9023, 2020.

Restoration of degraded land is an important national goal to achieve Indonesia’s environmental targets. To map both land cover and land degradation, Indonesia needs timely, high quality data and the necessary tools. We have addressed this issue by running a sequence of crowdsourcing campaigns. Our aim is not only to collect the data but to also potentially present a way for citizens to contribute to larger environmental policies and strategies. 

Focusing on land cover identification and tree cover change, we planned and ran a set of  pilot crowdsourcing campaigns in two provinces in Indonesia. We analysed the data from these pilot campaigns, and then used the insights obtained in the subsequent crowdsourcing campaign on land cover identification, upscaled to national level, which is currently ongoing. The campaigns were run using a mobile application developed as part of the RESTORE+ project. Through this application, we presented volunteers with simple microtasks by showing them satellite images and asking a simple yes/no question as to whether the image shows a particular land cover class. The application implemented a scoring system, which additionally performs a quality control of the data contributed by the crowd, and users competed with each other to classify the satellite images displayed by the application. 692 volunteers have actively engaged in the pilot crowdsourcing campaigns and have contributed more than 2.5 million satellite image interpretations.  

Based on the insights from the pilot campaigns, as well as an expert consultation session in Indonesia, the crowdsourcing application was modified to ensure, first, a uniform number of interpretations across the images, and secondly, higher quality data by allowing users to focus on geographical areas familiar to them, as well as to see the larger area surrounding the target sample.   

We analyzed the data collected and will present issues regarding data quality, comparing the accuracy of the contributions from the volunteers with the accuracy of the data collected by a set of experts. We show that a citizen science approach is promising and can complement scientific analyses and can provide potential inputs to policies on landscape restoration. A crowdsourcing approach to image interpretation can also help to shorten the time needed for data collection, making the process more cost-effective. In addition, the collective ownership of the results ensures their legitimacy and increases the chances of data acceptance.

We also focus on transparency and the importance of open data. We present how we have made data generated by the crowd accessible in order to empower citizens in exploring and process the data further, thereby actively participating in environmental decision making.

How to cite: Danylo, O., Hadi, H., Zulkarnain, T., Joshi, N., Ekadinata, A., Sturn, T., Mohamad, F., Goib, B., Yowargana, P., McCallum, I., Moorthy, I., See, L., Fritz, S., and Kraxner, F.: Building up local knowledge on restoration: lessons learnt from organizing a set of crowdsourcing campaigns , EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-19043, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-19043, 2020.

Within cities, vegetation along road corridors (variously referred to as nature strips, street verges or easements) can play a key role in providing habitat for wildlife and green space benefits for urban dwellers. In the city of Perth, Australia, many local government authorities (LGAs) now permit residents to convert the publicly owned land along the street in front of their dwelling from ‘traditional’ (yet exotic) turf to low growing, native gardens. ‘Verge gardens’ are perceived to require less water and better reflect a local sense of place by using plants endemic to the biodiversity hotspot in which Perth is situated. While interest in native verge gardens is growing rapidly within the community, there is relatively little supporting, spatially-based information for residents. The uncertainty of not knowing where to start is keenly felt by those residents for whom verge gardening is their first foray into gardening with native Western Australian plants in the sandy, nutrient-poor soils of Perth’s Swan Coastal Plain.

Two LGAs in the city of Perth, Western Australia, were the focus of this research, both of which have deployed incentive programs to encourage residents to plant native verge gardens over many years. We conducted detailed semi-structured interviews and participatory verge garden mapping with 22 households who had converted their verges to native gardens over the last ten years, gauging residents’ views on verge gardening, nature, wildlife, community and sense of belonging. A small number of respondents were already highly knowledgeable on the topic of native plants before planting their gardens, while the majority of the respondents had increased their knowledge of native plants from a low initial level through the process of verge gardening. Verge gardens were mapped to highlight plant species diversity, age of garden and garden design style. Some residents had already drawn their own maps by hand, and shared these with us. Others kept detailed records of water usage, maintenance, plant growth and turnover, and insect and bird visitors to the gardens.

A consistent theme that emerged from interviews with the majority of residents who claimed limited familiarity with native plants was a desire for more readily available information to help support their efforts. Information needs included: environmental data on soils, landforms, flora and fauna; knowledge of which plants would grow well in their soil type; where to source locally endemic plants; the most appropriate water and nutrient regime to care for the plants; and nearby examples of successful gardens from which to draw inspiration. Drawing on the results of interviews and participatory mapping, we present a prototype design for a public participatory mobile application that can provide geospatial and ecological information to help support residents, allow for initial planning and progressive micro-scale mapping of verge gardens, and provide the possibility for sharing information on exemplar gardens. Our research feeds into larger conversations among local-level policy makers and planners on urban greening, increasing social cohesion within suburban areas, and providing habitat for wildlife under conditions of environmental change and increasing population density.

How to cite: Pauli, N., Mouat, C., Atkins, M., Föllmer, J., Estima Ramalho, C., and Ligtermoet, E.: Connecting the green dots: Enabling micro-scale participatory mapping and planning for citizen stewards of biodiversity, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-12526, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-12526, 2020.

Sea level rise poses profound challenges within current municipal and regional governance since it requires unusually long planning horizons, is surrounded by great uncertainties, and gives rise to novel ethical challenges. Adaptation to climate change is fundamentally an ethical issue because the aim of any proposed adaptation measure is to protect that which is valued in society. One of the most salient ethical issues discussed in the adaptation literature relates to the distribution of climate related risks, vulnerabilities and benefits across populations and over time. Raising sea-walls is typically associated with high costs and potentially negative ecological impacts as well as substantial equity concerns; managed retreat or realignment often causes problems related to property rights; and migration out of low-lying areas can involve the loss of sense and cultural identity and impact on receiving communities.

How can the soft and ethical dimensions of rising mean sea levels be characterized and how can their consequences be mapped? To help municipalities to understand the values and ethics attached to measures to deal with long-term rising sea levels in southern Sweden, we are developing a methodology of soft or ethical values to complement to GIS-mapping of coastal vulnerability based on coastal characteristics and socio-economic factors.

Rather than determining these values a priori, they are being discerned through workshops with relevant stakeholders and in interviews with citizens residing in and utilizing the coastal areas. The methodology attempts to determine the place-based of values within coastal communities with a focus on “whose” values, “what” values, and the long-term or short-term nature of values. It builds on an analytical framework developed to acquire information on the behavior, knowledge, perception and feelings of people living, working and enjoying the coastal areas.  In turn this stakeholder-based information is used to co-create “story maps” as tools to communicate complicated vulnerability analyses, highlight the ethical dimensions of various adaptation measures, raise awareness and aid decisionmakers in taking uncomfortable decisions to “wicked” planning problems around the negative effects of sea level rise, coastal erosion and urban flooding.

This paper presents the methodological development of the task as well as the results the study in four Swedish municipalities. The representation of the “soft” and ethical values provides an opportunity to help clarify these values to policymakers and increase resilience to rising sea levels.

How to cite: Van Well, L., Björlin, A., Danielsson, P., Godefroid Ndayikengurukiye, G., and Göransson, G.: Mapping the soft and ethical dimensions of sea level rise in southern Sweden, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-21324, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21324, 2020.

Urban Gardening has become increasingly popular globally in the past two decades as urbanites begin to recognise the benefits of growing their own food and the sense of community these gardening activities engender. These activities grow as citizens reclaim derelict land and are increasingly using roof top gardens and novel containers, providing much needed green oases in the city, concepts which are particularly popular with the “share” generation. However, many such sites are in areas of high traffic density, on brown field sites or on sites overlying landfill, as a result of their urban location. The proximity to such sites may lead to worries about the food safety and reduction of the adoption of such healthy urban gardening practices. One of the main concerns is the transfer of urban pollutants into the consumer’s food chain. Trace metals are one of the contaminants frequently found in urban crops and soils. Perceived concerns about the effects of these heavy metal contaminants on human health often outweigh the true risk; part of the problem is the lack of data in the urban production context. Moreover, collection of city-wide data on the health of the soil is often difficult and expensive to collect. In this project we intend to attempt to overcome these issues by recruiting citizens to conduct simple common collaborative experiments in their urban gardens, from these data we will create a city map of soil health status and providing information on potential risk of heavy metal contaminants and ways in which to mitigate those risks in an Urban Gardening context. We chose a citizen science approach in this project, not only as it will allow us to gather a wealth of data but also it will empower us to jointly generate useful information for the greater public good which can contribute towards creating green sustainable cities.

This project will place the citizen at the heart of the experimental process in contrast to more traditional observational data collection. Using an experimental approach really exposes the citizens to the scientific process and enables them to gain tacit knowledge of how scientists overcome variance, bias and arrives at scientifically sound evidence based conclusions. As a result, citizen science can provide reassurance to the public about the rigour and process of scientific enquiry. In doing so it can inspire confidence and understanding of the nuances of political bias; putting contextual knowledge together, in learning by doing.

How to cite: Ziss, E., Friesl-Hanl, W., Noller, C., Watzinger, A., and Hood-Nowotny, R.: Heavy Metal City-Zen. Exploring the potential risk of heavy metal contamination of food crop plants in urban gardening contexts using a citizen science approach., EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-2380, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-2380, 2020.

River Chess is a chalk stream in South East England (UK), under unprecedented pressure from over-abstraction, urbanisation and climate change, which currently fails to meet good ecological status. Citizen Scientists have been active in the catchment for 9 years carrying out riverfly monitoring due chiefly to concerns about water quality and poor fish populations. The River Chess is also a pilot river for a new catchment-based ‘Smarter Water Catchments’ programme run by the region’s wastewater treatment company (Thames Water) which aims to work with local communities and regulators to deliver improvements to the river by tackling multiple challenges together. The community-led ChessWatch project is a part of this initiative, and is designed to raise public awareness of threats to the River Chess and involve the public in river management activities using a sensor network as a platform. In 2018 four water quality sensors were installed in the river to provide stakeholders with real-time water quality data (15-minute intervals) to support catchment management activities. The dataset from the project is intended to support future decision-making in the catchment as part of the five-year ‘Smarter Water Catchments’ approach.

Our presentation will review the successes and drawbacks of the ChessWatch project to date and examine the challenges of linking the data collected by the project to policy and practice in a catchment with multiple stakeholder groups. We present the results of a participatory mapping exercise held at local community events to capture the public use of, and concerns for, the river revealing concerns for low flows and water quality issues linked to abstraction and runoff. We show how dissolved oxygen, temperature, turbidity, chlorophyll-a and tryptophan measurements made by the sensors are enabling local stakeholders to better understand the threats to the river arising from urban runoff and changing rainfall patterns, and we examine the challenges of data presentation, sharing and usage in an urbanised catchment with high water demand and multiple conflicting interests.

How to cite: Heppell, C., Bartlett, A., Beechey, A., Jennings, P., and Souteriou, H.: ChessWatch: Observations on a Citizen Science approach to catchment management., EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-17950, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-17950, 2020.

There is growing consensus that making our research process and outputs more open is necessary to increase transparency, efficiency, reproducibility and relevance of research. With that we should be better able to contribute to answering important questions and overcoming grand challenges. Despite considerable attention for open science, including citizen science, there is no overall baseline showing the current state of openness in our field. This presentation shows results from research that quantitatively charts the adoption of open practices across the geosciences, mostly globally and across the full research workflow. They range from setting research priorities, collaboration with global south researchers and researchers in other disciplines, sharing code and data, sharing posters online, sharing early versions of papers as preprints, publishing open access, opening up peer review, using open licenses when sharing, to engaging with potential stakeholders of research outcomes and reaching out to the wider public. The assessment uses scientometric data, publication data, data from sharing platforms and journals, altmetrics data, and mining of abstracts and other outputs, aiming to address the breadth of open science practices. The resulting images show that open science application is not marginal anymore, but at the same time certainly not mainstream. It also shows that limited sharing, limited use of open licenses and limited use of permanent IDs makes this type of assessment very hard. Insights derived from the study are relevant inputs in science policy discussions on data requirements, open access, researcher training and involvement of societal partners.

How to cite: Bosman, J.: Openness in geoscience - a quantitative assessment, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-20766, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-20766, 2020.

The increasing densification in cities worldwide has led to various challenges, one of them being the loss of green spaces, which leads to increasing and diversifying pressure on the remaining green infrastructure. As city´s green infrastructure delivers important ecosystem services, crucial to its resident´s wellbeing, it is of uttermost importance to secure a resilient flow of benefits from the remaining green spaces. To find suitable ways to navigate the current challenges and create sustainable and resilient urban landscapes, urban land use planning, decision-making and practical management need to gain deeper insights to how residents perceive and interact with their surrounding landscapes, particularly the remaining green spaces. How people value green spaces and what perceived barriers to these are can highly influence if or to what extent people use green spaces and hence have access to their potential benefits.

Until now, methods such as on-site visitor studies, online surveys or public participation GIS have been applied to understand how people perceive and use green spaces. Nevertheless, complementary methods are needed that address what people perceive in a landscape based on their own presentation and associations. The mental mapping approach has the potential to add new layers of knowledge (e.g. local knowledge, tacit knowledge) about how residents perceive their surrounding city landscape and how different perceptions can evolve from a landscape. By applying this method as a participatory mapping tool and accessing additional sources of knowledge, decisions in urban planning and practical management can be improved and potential land use conflicts proactively detected and navigated.

The city of Stockholm, a rapidly densifying urban environment, was chosen as a case study area to analyze how the mental mapping method can contribute to understanding people's perceptions of their surrounding green spaces focusing on recreational purposes. In summer 2018, about 90 residents in two neighboring districts in Stockholm, were asked to draw a sketch map of outdoor, green places they go to for recreational purposes, afterwards answering a few interview questions regarding perceived benefits and barriers to green space and sense of place. The collected mental maps showed the resident´s spatial perceptions, orientations, preferences, and important landscape elements. Repeatedly drawn landscape elements provided information about a shared geographical imaginary and important hot-spots in the study areas. Ongoing transformation processes through densification were already impacting respondent´s perceptions and their sense of place. In conclusion, this study showcases in what ways mental mapping has a great potential to improve the understanding of people's perceptions of the landscape and its green spaces, which can in turn support a resilient and locally adjusted landscape planning process, design and practical management. 

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The study is part of the Enable research project: http://projectenable.eu/

This research was funded through the 2015–2016 BiodivERsA COFUND call for research proposals, with the national funders the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences, and Spatial Planning; the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency; the German Aerospace Center; the National Science Centre (Poland; grant no. 2016/22/Z/NZ8/00003); the Research Council of Norway; and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

How to cite: Otto, J., Borgström, S., and Haase, D.: Green spaces for recreation in densifying urban landscapes through the eyes of the residents – mental mapping in southern Stockholm, Sweden, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-9100, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-9100, 2020.

Citizen science can be used to collect vast and timely data, while promoting active learning on selected topics. The Bavarian Citizen Science Portal for Climate Research and Science Communication (BAYSICS) is a scientific project which started in 2018 with 10 partner institutions in Bavaria. It aims to achieve (1) citizens’ participation in climate change research through innovative digital forms, (2) transfer of knowledge on the complexity of climate change and its local consequences, and (3) joint scientific and environmental education goals. 

Within the BAYSICS project, a web portal has been developed that builds the interface between researchers and citizens. In the initial phase, the interests from the different research disciplines participating in the project were identified. Currently, the IT structure for the web portal is developed based on the needs of the project. Free tools such as PostgreSQL, Django, Gunicorn and Nginx are used. The researchers involved have the opportunity to integrate research topic specific questions and data collection guidelines for citizens. 

On the web portal, users are able to choose a topic from four different areas (phenology, pollen, tree, and animals) and submit their observations in multiple data types (pictures, geolocations, and texts). The observation data is visualized on a map of the web portal. The data collected within the project is freely available for download on the web portal, while protecting user’s privacy. Application Programming Interface (API) is developed to enable interaction with other software products and services.

A first test phase within the project members start at the beginning of 2020. Afterwards, a second test phase is planned involving potential users (e.g. school students and teachers). The outcomes from the test phases will be used for evaluation.

How to cite: Batsaikhan, A. and Weismüller, J.: A Citizen Science Web Portal for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate Change (BAYSICS): Development and Evaluation, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-1472, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-1472, 2020.

The observation and reporting of flora and fauna with the help of citizen scientists has a long tradition. However, citizen science projects have also a high potential for the reporting and mapping of landforms, as well as for observing landscape dynamics. While remote sensing has opened up new mapping and monitoring possibilities at high spatial and temporal resolutions, there is still a growing demand for gathering (spatial) data directly in the field (reporting on actual events, landform characteristics, and landscape changes, provision of reference data and photos). This becomes even more relevant since climate change effects (e.g. glacier retreat, shift of precipitation regime, melting of permafrost) will likely result in more significant morphological changes with an impact on the landscape.

In the project citizenMorph (Observation and Reporting of Landscape Dynamics by Citizens; http://citizenmorph.sbg.ac.at) we developed a pilot web-based interactive application that allows and supports citizens to map and contribute field data (spatial data, in-situ information, geotagged photos) on landforms. Such features are, for example, mass movements (e.g. rockfall, landslide, debris flow), glacial features (e.g. rock glacier, moraine, drumlin), volcanic features (e.g. lava flow, lahar, mudpot), or coastal features (e.g. cliff, coastal erosion, skerry). To design and implement a system that fully matches experts’ and citizens’ requirements, that ensures that citizens benefit from participating in citizenMorph, and that provides extensive, high-quality data, citizen representatives (mainly high school students, students, and seniors) actively and directly took part in the development process. These users are considered as particularly critical, sensitive to usability and accessibility issues, and demanding when it comes to using information and communication technology (ICT). In line with the concept of participatory design, citizen representatives were involved in all steps of the development process: specification of requirements, design, implementation, and testing of the system. The generation of a pilot was done using Survey123 for ArcGIS, a survey to collect data in the field, i.e. type and location of the landform, overview image and image series of the landform, and the content management system WordPress to create a website to inform, guide and support the participants. Throughout the survey (https://arcg.is/15WPKv0) and the website, different kinds of information (e.g. project information, guidelines for data collection and reporting, data protection information) are given to the participants. The final citizenMorph system was tested and discussed on several events with citizen representatives in Austria, Germany, and Iceland. Feedback from the tests was gathered using techniques such as observation, focus groups, and interviews/questionnaires. This allowed us to evaluate and improve the system as a whole.

The collected data, particularly the image series, are used for 3D reconstruction of the surface using Structure from Motion (SfM) and dense image matching (DIM) methods. Moreover, the collected data can be helpful for enriching and validating remote sensing based mapping results and increasing their detail and information content. Having a comprehensive database, holding field data and remote sensing data together, is of importance for any subsequent analysis and for broadening our knowledge about geomorphological landscape dynamics and the prevalence of landforms.

How to cite: Hölbling, D., Hennig, S., Abad, L., Ecke, S., and Tiede, D.: Observation and Reporting of Landforms and Landscape Dynamics by Citizens, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-13593, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-13593, 2020.

The NoiseCap experiment was an unfunded follow up of the Energic-OD project (European NEtwork for Redistributing Geospatial Information to user Communities - Open Data), which had started in October 2014 and ended in September 2017 and had been supported by the European Union under the Competitiveness and Innovation framework Programme (CIP).

The project built on one of Energic-OD outcomes, the NoiseCapture Android app, allowing cell phone users to measure their outdoor noise environment and optionally share their measurements on the free and open-source Noise-Planet platform and scientific toolset for environmental noise assessment. Each noise measurement is annotated with its location and can be displayed in interactive noise maps, within the app and on the Noise-Planet portal.

In NoiseCap, we were primarily interested in extending the NoiseCapture use case to indoor settings, hence we chose to focus on air traffic noise (namely landing events), which is well characterized and identifiable by citizens living in airport surroundings. Our experiment targeted the neighbourhood of the airport of Florence, Italy, but may be easily reproduced in any similar community. We were also interested in assessing the reliability of commercial cell phone in measuring indoor noise, by comparing collected data with appropriate reference measurement.

User participation in NoiseCap was on a completely voluntary basis, e.g. volunteers were free to choose whether to measure any given landing event, during the period of the campaign, which lasted for several weeks. Participants were mainly enrolled through the local network of environmental activists and were asked to follow a simple protocol, to ensure their individual measurements would be taken in nearly identical conditions, in particular from the same spot, specified by the volunteer during registration.

From a technological viewpoint, the implementation of NoiseCap has highlighted a substantial lack of open Event-Driven standards and solutions in contemporary Spatial Data Infrastructures, e.g. for processing spatial time series, identify events and apply event pattern matching. We have developed a customized architectural approach, including a notification service based on raw ADS-B Mode S data processing and a proprietary solution (Telegram-based push messages), to alert the volunteers with individual time-before-overflight estimations.

In conclusion, the NoiseCap experiment has provided useful insights on Event-Driven Architectures, as well as on the application of citizen science to sensitive issues in local communities.

How to cite: Bigagli, L., Salzano, R., and Olivieri, M.: NoiseCap: a citizen science experiment to raise awareness of noise environments with cell phones, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-22523, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-22523, 2020.

Successful ‘smart’ agricultural interventions provide mutually positive impacts to inhabitants’ livelihoods, landscape sustainability, and the capacity of a system to respond effectively to climate variability. Geospatial technological tools have the potential for accurate and timely locational monitoring within multifunctional landscapes. Information derived from using such tools can substantially inform environmental management, policy, and climate-resilient practice. Our research is developing a mobile geospatial application for contemporary data collection and monitoring, allowing the dynamic capture of landscape information. Through community consultations, stakeholder engagement activities, and Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) user requirements analysis, we have mapped government data flows and information needs of smallholder farmers in the Pacific Island nations of Fiji and Tonga. Subsequently, the barriers experienced by landscape users to access and understand relevant, reliable and usable environmental data and information were identified. We then designed an open-source mobile geospatial application to facilitate knowledge sharing between different landscape stakeholders. Our multi-user open source application – qConut – is being co-developed with the Ministry of Forests in Fiji and the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forests in Tonga, alongside collaborative participatory contributions from the wider farming communities. Here we present the methodological approach, application functionality, and prototype usability outcomes from field testing undertaken in the Ba Catchment, Fiji, and Tongatapu, Tonga. The qConut application has a current target user focus on agricultural extension officers who are trialling the application within cropping and forestry sectors. Results of trial usage highlight the importance of understanding the specific needs and capacities of all stakeholder groups in developing effective digitally-enabled climate information services. By utilising mobile geospatial technologies our research is helping to address shortcomings in location-targeted information delivery, environmental monitoring, and data sharing within Pacific Island agricultural communities. See www.livelihoodsandlandscapes.com for further information.

How to cite: Biggs, E., Boruff, B., Boyland, M., Bruce, E., Davies, K., Duncan, J., Grünbühel, C., Manu, V., Mateboto, J., Myat Thu, P., Neef, A., Oakeshott, J., Pauli, N., Shojaei, H., Varea, R., and Wales, N.: qConut: A mobile geospatial application for promoting sustainable and climate-smart Pacific Island agricultural landscapes, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-2805, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-2805, 2020.

The first phase of the citizen science Interoperability Experiment organized by the Interoperability Community of Practice in the EU H2020 WeObserve project under the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) innovation program and supported by the four H2020 Citizen Observatories projects (SCENT, GROW, LandSense & GroundTruth 2.0) as well as the EU H2020 NEXTGEOSS project has finalized with the release of an Engineering Report in the OGC website. The activity, initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA), EC Joint Research Center (JRC), the Wilson Center, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and CREAF wanted to covered aspects of data sharing architectures for citizen science data, data quality, data definitions and user authentication. 

The final aim is to propose solutions for Citizen Science data to be integrated in the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). The solution is necessarily a combination of technical and networking components, being the first ones the focus of this work. The applications of international geospatial standards in current citizen science and citizen observatory projects to improve interoperability and foster innovation is one of the main tasks in during the experiment to achieve the final aim.

The main result was to demonstrate that OGC Sensor Observing Service (SOS) standard can be used for citizen science data (as already proposed in the OGC SWE4CS discussion paper) by implementing it in servers that were combined by visualization clients showing Citizen Science observations from different projects together. The adoption of SOS opened new opportunities for creating interoperable components such as a quality assessment tool. In parallel, an authentication server was used to federate three project observers in a single community. Lessons learned will be used to define an architecture for the H2020 COS4Cloud project. The second phase of the Interoperability Experiment has already started and developments and tests will be conducted by participants in the next 9 months. Some open issues identified and document in the Engineering Report will be addressed in the second phase of the experiment, including the use of a Definitions Server and the adoption of the OGC SensorThings API as an alternative to SOS. The second phase will finalize in September 2020 with a presentation in the Munich OGC Technical Committee meeting. The call for participation and additional contributions will remain for the whole duration of the activity

How to cite: Masó, J., Prat, E., Cobley, A., Matheus, A., Julià, N., Jirka, S., Klan, F., Tsiakos, V., and Schade, S.: Advancing in Citizen Science Interoperability by testing standard components between Citizen Observatories, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-18531, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-18531, 2020.

A new methodology for the assessment of soil slaking using a mobile app named SLAKES was developed. The app uses an image recognition algorithm that measures the increasing area of soil aggregates immersed in water at regular intervals over a 10 minutes period. This method measures the kinetics of the slaking process and returns a continuous stability index from 0 (very stable) to higher numbers (higher than 7 as very unstable with 14 as a commonly observed maxima).

The methodology was originally presented in  Fajardo et al. (2016) using a dataset covering a great part of the agro-ecological variability of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. By 2020 the app is already present in 36 countries from 6 continents in its Android version (released in 2017) and the iPhone version is gradually reaching an increasing audience (released in December 2019).

This work presents a study made in a medium sized farm in New South Wales, Australia. Top-soil (0-10 cm) samples were surveyed and analysed by undergraduate students using the app. Different maps of soil aggregate stability were created showing evident aggregate stability geographical patterns at medium scale. The use of SLAKES has shown reliability compared with traditional methods as shown in third party scientific publications. The simplicity of SLAKES makes this app a simple yet powerful way to assess aggregate stability and shows great potential to be included in both citizen and open science educational programs.

Fajardo, M., McBratney, A.B., Field, D.J., Minasny, B., 2016. Soil slaking assessment using image recognition. Soil and Tillage Research 163, 119-129.

How to cite: Fajardo, M., Jones, E., and Wittig, R.: Assessing soil aggregate stability with mobile phones, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-3240, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-3240, 2020.

The MacroSeismic Sensor network (MSS network) is a dense layout of 46 custom-built seismic low-cost sensors in populated area in the southern part of the Vienna Basin, Austria. The recorded ground-motion is sent to a central server using the Internet, processed on the server and then visualized in a web application in near real-time. The MSS network has been started 2014 by a funding program dedicated to the participation of young people and “Citizen Science” (Sparkling Science - a program of Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research Austria) and has been further developed and kept in operation by private and public funding, participation of public schools as well as voluntary contribution of individuals.

The MSS uses 4.5 Hz geophones, 16bit analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) at a sampling rate of 100 samples per second and the Seedlink protocol for data transmission. A Raspberry Pi single board computer is used for controlling a custom-built ADC circuit board, data transmission and communication. Time synchronization is done using the Network Time Protocol.

For the visualization, the peak-ground-velocity is computed using 2 horizontal components at a sampling rate of 1 sample per second. An amplitude threshold algorithm using the Delaunay triangulation of the MSS network is used for the detection of seismic events and an amplitude-based localization method is used to compute the epicenter of the events.

The peak-ground-velocity and the detected events are presented on a map display by the web application with a focus of an intuitive presentation of the current state and the short-term history of the ground-motion within the area of the MSS network.

The output of the MSS network is used by public and private institutions. The the regional hazard warning center of Lower Austria (Landeswarnzentrale Niederösterreich) has integrated the MSS network visualization into their infrastructure to inform and warn the general public in case of a strong ground-motion in the area. A local quarry operator uses the data of the MSS network for a transparent monitoring and documentation of their blasting activity.

How to cite: Mertl, S., Brückl, E., Brückl, J., Carniel, P., Filz, K., Krieger, M., and Stickler, G.: The MacroSeismic-Sensor Network, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-3555, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-3555, 2020.

The Copernicus User Uptake Initiative is part of the European Union’s strategy for increasing the level of awareness of the Copernicus Program at European and worldwide level, fostering the adoption of Copernicus-based data/solution in the everyday life of each kind of potential stakeholder, from Local Regional Authorities (LRA) to Big and/or Small Enterprises to normal citizens. The CoRdiNet (Copernicus Relays for digitalization spanning a Network) projects was funded in the frame of Horizon 2020 Space Hubs call (grant agreement n. 821911), to implement and reinforce the user uptake actions among the network of the so called Copernicus Relays. The latter, as part of the Space strategy for Europe of the European Commission, act as Copernicus Ambassadors, providing their contribution for a better dissemination and promotion of Copernicus-based solution at local/regional scale. Among the goals of the Cordinet project there are: i) Supporting, promoting and stimulating digitalization and new business solutions based on Earth observation data from the Copernicus project; ii) bundling the local expertise in the civil use of Earth observation close to the needs and offers of citizens, administration and businesses.

Earth Observation data from space, in fact, can provide products and services to citizens and can be profitably integrated with non-conventional data, e.g the ones coming from citizen observatories and sciences. However, presently Copernicus data and information are still under-exploited and further efforts are needed to engage stakeholders (including normal citizens), investigating the causes that have prevented from a more systematic and diffuse use of Copernicus/EO data so far. In fact, an increased awareness about the Copernicus program, its data, products and services, will allow for a better integration of non-conventional (e.g. citizen-based) observations, enabling new services and solutions, more close to the citizen needs and requirements for a better quality of life.

With this aim, one of the tasks of the project was specifically devoted to the identification and engagement of the stakeholders within the CoRdiNet partner geographic regions, including also the external ones involved by a specific call for expression of interest, and it was carried out by TeRN in collaboration with CNR-IMAA. In particular, after their engagement, stakeholders were asked to answer to a questionnaire aimed at analyzing their needs and capabilities and evaluating which barriers have prevented for a more systematic use of Copernicus solutions so far in their own activities. Results achieved analyzing collected feedback will be presented and discussed in this work, providing also a few preliminary recommendations about how to cope with the identified gaps.

How to cite: Lacava, T., Bernardini Papalia, L., Paradiso, I. F., Proto, M., and Pergola, N.: On the barriers limiting the adoption of the Earth Observation Copernicus data and services and their integration with non-conventional (e.g. citizen) observations: the EU CoRdiNet project contribution., EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-18649, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-18649, 2020.

Nepal is highly vulnerable to multiple disasters due to its topography and geographic conditions. It also suffers with data deficiency in better understanding the impacts of disasters and existing capacities to cope with such disasters. This information scarcity severely hinders understanding the disasters and their associated risks in the areas. This also hampers local and regional risk reduction, preparedness and response, limiting rigorous and robust disaster risk modelling and assessment. For regions facing recurrent disaster, there is a strong need of more integrated and proactive perspective into the management of disaster risks and innovations. Recent advances on digital and spatial technologies, citizen science and open data are introducing opportunities through prompt data collection, analysis and visualization of locally relevant spatial data. These data could be used as evidence in local development planning as well as linking in different services of the areas. This will be helpful for sustained investment in disaster risk management and resilience building. In current federal structure of Nepal, there is an acute data deficiency at the local level (municipalities and wards) in terms of data about situation analysis, demographics, and statistics, disaster impacts (hazard, exposure and vulnerability) etc. This has caused hindrances to all the relevant stakeholders including government, non-government and donors in diagnosing the available resources, capacities for effective planning and managing disaster risks. In this context, we are piloting an approach to fulfil existing data gaps by mobilizing citizen science through the use of open data sources in Western Nepal. We have already tested it through trainings to the local authorities and the communities in using open data for data collection. Likewise, in one of our upcoming project on data innovations, we shall create a repository of available open data sources; develop analytical tools for risk assessment which will be able to provide climate related services. Later, upon testing the tools, these can be implemented at the local level for informed decision making.

How to cite: Shakya, P. and Parajuli, B. P.: Using Open Data and Citizen Science in Understanding Disaster Risk: Experience from Western parts of Nepal, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-6443, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-6443, 2020.

The CITRAM project aims at improving traffic quality in cities with the help of floating car data provided by citizens. During CITRAM, the citizen science platform enviroCar (https://www.enviroCar.org) has been extended and is used to collect floating car data in three German cities. Citizens are invited to collect data in designated field tests while driving their day-to-day routes. These collected trajectories are anonymised, stored and published under an open data policy in a central server.

Dedicated postprocessing services using new concepts for evaluation and visualization analyze the data on a daily basis deriving traffic quality characteristics. The raw data and the processed reports are used by the cities and their planners to assess the traffic quality and to deduce actions to improve traffic management.

The project also raises the awareness of an environmentally improved driving behavior through the collection of floating car data enriched with individual energy and fuel consumption along the recorded routes of electric and internal combustion engine driven cars. Through the integration of municipal information infrastructure into a dedicated real-time Smart City platform and a model accounting for the dynamic control of traffic light systems, a traffic light phase assistant app (ECOMAT) further supports the driver in a foresighted and energy optimized driving behavior by providing Green Light Optimised Speed Advisory (GLOSA) and Time To Green (TTG) information in real-time.

The motivation of CITRAM is the coupling of system components that enable scientists, traffic engineers and citizens to collaborate on knowledge acquisition concerning driving in motorized traffic. We will present the developed tool set and the results from the analysis of floating car data collected by citizens. The analysis assess the quality of traffic flow within the municipality as well as characteristics of individual trajectories or dedicated routes.

How to cite: Gräler, B., Doll, C., Mück, J., Remke, A., Schramm, D., de Wall, A., and Wulffius, H.: CITRAM - Citizen Science for Traffic Management, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-19952, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-19952, 2020.

Integrated use of citizen science (crowdsourcing in general) and remote sensing is essential to comprehend the complexity of the notion of landscape, based on subjective experience and objective structure of environment. Organisation-related landscape attributes, such as landscape diversity and orderliness, as well as the extent of colour harmony, greenness, and transport accessibility, were recently recognised as indicators for visual and recreational values of environment. However, it is currently an open research question, whether mentioned anthropocentric nature-related values are dependable on these landscape attributes, quantifiable with GIS and remote sensing, and accurate mapping of aesthetic and recreational landscape services is important to answer this question. Image hosting services and social networks provide a huge source of evidence on the aesthetic and recreational landscape experience, allowing for mapping the intangible anthropocentric values with publicly shared georeferenced photographs. Therefore, we aimed to apply automated image recognition with Clarifai service to assign each photograph with tags, reflecting its content, and further topic modelling (a variety of textual analysis) to group the tags into the categories.

In this study, we used combined Flickr and VK.com dataset for 2016-2018 years, collected via official APIs within the territory or Estonia; outdoor photographs were grouped into three classes: aesthetic landscape experience, outdoor recreation activities and wildlife watching. Non-relevant photographs and photographs with repeating content from the same author were excluded from analysis; a dataset of >10000 photographs was finally analysed. Cloud-free summertime Landsat-8 mosaic for 2018 was used to estimate the landscape diversity, orderliness, colour harmony extent, greenness and other metrics, whereas digital elevation model and land use/land cover model were used to map landscape coherence, terrain ruggedness, and indicate transport accessibility. Contrary to previous findings, users of Flickr and VK.com tend to take photographs of lower landscape diversity and lower greenness. We confirm that, according to the photographs being studied, water presence, terrain ruggedness, and transport accessibility are the best indicators of recreational experience. Colour harmony of land cover and landscape coherence are moderately higher for actual outdoor photographs.

Performance of the mentioned indicators varies among the groups of photographs, wildlife watching is the least predictable class of recreational landscape services. The applicability of remote sensing-based mapping of landscape attributes and textual analysis of tags, extracted for outdoor photographs, is examined and discussed. Our results contribute to the deeper understanding of landscape pattern and processes, responsible for visual and recreational values, as well as the methodology is based on the integrated quantitative approach, supporting evidence-based landscape science and decision-making.

How to cite: Karasov, O., Külvik, M., Heremans, S., and Domnich, A.: Using geotagged photographs and remote sensing to examine visual and recreational landscape values in Estonia, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-10702, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-10702, 2020.

Transparency in Hamburg's scientific community, the further development of Hamburg as a university location, open access to research results, and secure long-term data storage are the main objectives of the Hamburg Open Science program. Hamburg Open Science bundles eight inter-university projects to promote open science at Hamburg's six state universities, the University Medical Center Hamburg Eppendorf and the Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky State and University Library.

The program is funded by the city of Hamburg for the period 2018-2020 and is supported by the Ministry of Science, Research and Equality. The eight projects science data management, science information system, open access repositories, archive data storage, modern publishing, web platform, 3D and audio visual science data, and the digital cultural change are developing the basis for the long-term operation of Open Science services from 2021 onwards. The web platform www.openscience.hamburg.de provides access to research results from Hamburg and is to be expanded into an information platform on science in Hamburg.

The idea of Open Science in the program context is that the digitalization of science enables a complete redesign of basic science principles and turning them into reality under the principles of transparency, reproducibility, reusability, open communication and exchange.

Therefore, the project aims of the digital cultural change are to create an awareness of open science among researchers and to integrate openness into their everyday work so that they can continue to focus on their research. The Hamburg Open Science program thus supports all orientations of Open Science by actively supporting scientists in their working methods, structures and behavior patterns towards open science.

How to cite: Scharffenberg, M. and Olschofsky, K.: The Digital Cultural Change within the Program Hamburg Open Science, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-20396, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-20396, 2020.

Nepal is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change due to its high-relief topography, heavy monsoon rainfall, and weak governance. Landslides are common across almost all Nepal’s vast Himalaya mountains, of which the Far Western region suffers most, and climate change, coupled with severe under-development is expected to exacerbate the situation. Deficiency in spatial data and information seriously hinder the design and effective implementation of development plans, especially in the least developed areas, such as Seti River Basin in Far Western Nepal, where landslides constantly devastate landscapes and communities. We adopted a participatory mapping process with emerging collaborative digital mapping techniques to tackle the problem of critical information gaps, especially spatial risk information at local levels which compromise efforts for sustainable landscape planning and uses in disaster prone regions. In short, participatory here refers to working with local stakeholders and collaborative refers to crowdsourced map information with citizens and professionals. Engaging a wide range of stakeholders and non-stakeholder citizens in this integrated mapping processes eventually structure human capital at local scales with skills and knowledge on maps and mapping techniques. Also, this approach increases spatial knowledge and their uses in development planning at the local level and eventually increases landscape resilience through improved information management. We will further discuss how this integrated approach may provide an effective link between planning, designing, and implementing development plans amid fast policy and environmental changes and implications for communities in the developing world, especially in the context of climate change and its cascading effects.

How to cite: Khadka, P., Liu, W., Parajuli, B. P., and Pudasaini, U.: Participatory mapping and collaborative action for inclusive and sustainable mountain landscape development in Far West Nepal, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-17907, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-17907, 2020.

Citizen Science (CS) operates at the interface of engineering, natural and social sciences. The topic is currently gaining importance, which, from a political perspective, is based, among other things, on the hope of increasing the acceptance of science and scientific knowledge among the general public. The involvement of non-specialists in the conception and implementation of research projects enables and requires the development of innovative educational concepts that integrate knowledge transfer and added value to science, for example through citizen-based data acquisition. This win-win situation of active learning and the generation of research-relevant data can be implemented in educational institutions in particular by expanding didactic concepts with the integration of citizen science.

As an example, the project of the DLR in cooperation with the Friedrich Schiller University Jena will be presented. The campaign took place at site 15 km to the SE of Jena featuring planted and intensively managed forest. During the past two years the forest was affected by several stressors such as storm events, long drought periods (spring 2018 and 2019, summer 2018), and bark beetle attacks. Thus, forest management activities were conducted in June 2019 to remove stressed and infected trees. Two CS campaigns were conducted: one before (May) and one after (July) the management action (cross validation, check which trees were logged). The aim was to collect the stem circumference, the species, and other describing parameters. The citizens were “gathered“ from a university lecture for forthcoming Geography teachers. During the campaign a new approach for improved positioning under challenging GNSS conditions was tested (offset correction using Bluetooth low energy beacons – BLE).

How to cite: Thiel, C., Dubois, C., Klan, F., Pathe, C., Schmullius, C., Baade, J., Müller, M., and Cremer, F.: Knowledge transfer through Citizen Science using the example of a forest inventory campaign, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-22236, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-22236, 2020.

Skeptical Science (SkS) is a website with international reach founded by John Cook in 2007. The main purpose of SkS is to debunk misconceptions and misinformation about human-caused climate change and features a database that currently has more than 200 rebuttals based on peer-reviewed literature. Over the years, SkS has evolved from a one-person operation to a team project with science-minded volunteers from around the globe. The Skeptical Science team also actively contribute to published research, with a highlight being the often cited 97% consensus paper published in 2013 (Cook et al. 2013) for which team members content-analysed about 12,000 abstracts in a study whose publication fee was crowd-funded by readers of the website.

The SkS author community formed in 2010 in response to the proposal to expand existing rebuttals to three levels: basic, intermediate, and advanced. Since then, team members regularly collaborate to write and review rebuttal and blog articles for the website. Volunteer translators from many countries have translated selected content into more than 20 languages including booklets such as The Debunking Handbook, The Uncertainty Handbook or The Consensus Handbook. In addition to the already mentioned consensus study, team members have helped with other research projects initiated by John Cook such as the efforts to train a computer to detect and classify climate change misinformation. Another significant project is the Massive Open Online Course (or MOOC) “Denial101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial” in collaboration with the University of Queensland, for which the SkS team produced numerous video lectures and for which forum moderators were recruited. Outreach activities such as the “97 Hours of Consensus” were crowdsourced with team members collecting and organising content and providing technical support.

Challenges: Due to the volunteer nature of people’s involvement, there are some challenges involved as not everybody is available to help with tasks all the time. People help as much – or as little – as their time allows and there’s always some turn-over with new people joining while others leave.

Skeptical Science (SkS): (accessed November 29, 2019)

Cook, J., Nuccitelli, D., Green, S. A., Richardson, M., Winkler, B., Painting, R., Way, R., Jacobs, P., & Skuce, A. (2013). . Environmental Research Letters, 8(2), 024024+.

Cook, J., Schuennemann, K., Nuccitelli, D., Jacobs, P., Cowtan, K., Green, S., Way, R., Richardson, M., Cawley, G., Mandia, S., Skuce, A., & Bedford, D. (April 2015). Denial101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial. edX.

Cook, J., & Lewandowsky, S. (2011). . St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland. ISBN 978-0-646-56812-6.

How to cite: Winkler, B. and Cook, J.: The story of Skeptical Science: How citizen science helped to turn a website into a go-to resource for climate science, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-562, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-562, 2020.

Citizen science approaches are still relatively rare in soil sciences. However, the Tea Bag Index (TBI) has been successfully implemented in projects all over the world.

Our citizen science project “Expedition ERDreich – Mit Teebeuteln den Boden erforschen” (EE) aims to upscale open soil data by applying the TBI as well as other soil assessment methods all over Germany. Beside the strong focus on creating awareness for soils and its functions we want to answer the following questions:

The project will combine aspects of co-production as well as environmental education. Co-production means, soil data will individually be compiled by citizen scientists with the support of a team of scientists from a network of project partners. While conducting various soil assessments and experiments participating citizen scientists will be given background information and guidance meant to educate and to raise awareness about soils and soil quality.

We are aiming to involve a broad spectrum of citizens from various backgrounds, for example school children, students, farmers, forest owners, gardeners, municipal administrations, and of course soil scientists.

Within the project citizen scientists will submit turnover data from their location, together with information on the sampling sites, as well as information on soil properties like pH value, soil texture, and soil color. This information will be complemented with climatic and geo-scientific co-variables by the scientific project team.

So far we identified the following main challenges:

• How can citizens from various backgrounds and in various geographical locations be addressed and involved in the project?

• How do we get high quality soil data while still teaching soil awareness?

• How do we address the complexity of soils in soil education?

• How do we manage the quality of data and identify potential errors?

• How do we communicate data management procedures to keep the project as transparent as possible?

• What and how can we give back an added value to citizen scientists?

• How do we involve citizen scientists in the scientific progress beyond collecting data and beyond the current projects timeframe?

How to cite: Schneider, C., Döhler, S., Ohmann, L., and Wollschläger, U.: Can we use citizen science to upscale soil data collection?, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-20373, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-20373, 2020.

One mission of a researcher is to share their work and results with the general public but there is a real challenge in accurately and effectively sharing scientific results with a broad audience. Indeed, they are published in scientific journals that are mostly available at high costs; the vocabulary used makes it hard for people outside of the field to understand the concepts; and sometimes there is a language barrier for non-English speakers.

However, to make informed decisions on a variety of scientific and societal topics, citizens need to have access to and keep up with these research results. To build critical thinking, this good practise should be developed from an early age. We created the journal DECODER (French for “to decode”, journal-decoder.fr), which enables a researcher and a class to work together on their own simplified research article. The middle and high school students can have the role of active reviewers on the researcher’s shorten article or they can write an outreach article on a given topic in which the researcher is a specialist. Articles are then published under a creative commons license and are freely available on the journal website to benefit a majority. Our partner researchers work in space agencies, in academia, or in industry, in a variety of disciplines from STEM to social sciences. The emphasis is set on multidisciplinarity to raise students’ awareness about research wideness and show them that research is not limited to STEM fields but also exists in economics and humanities. This points out the significance and ubiquity of transdisciplinarity in solving real world’s problems, such as global change issues, biological and physical questions or space exploration from different perspectives. In its first year and a half, the journal has already involved more than ten classes in five different schools and 18 articles have been submitted by ten researchers. The project allows a tight and direct interaction between students and researchers and it makes students responsible for the publication content over a large audience. Thanks to an easy procedure for classes and researchers and small-time requirement, our hope is to mobilize the largest scientific community to help people being more critics and having access to scientific results.

How to cite: Dalmas, B., Goncalves, B., Poulet, L., Vernay, A., and Vernay, M.: A multidisciplinary scientific outreach journal designed for and made by middle and high school students to bring research closer to the classroom, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-21726, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21726, 2020.

Rural tourism is an activity that protects the environment in comparison with the consumer industries, becoming an ally in the conservation of the environment. All of the rural areas of the country, the most consistent through potential is the mountain area, which is why we chose as a case study, the mountain region of Suceava county. Starting from the hypothesis that the tourist offer of the mountain area is attractive, the research aims at the degree of tourist satisfaction with the tourist offer of the rural area of ​​Suceava county.  

The methodology is based on the conducted survey on the basis of the questionnaire by the method of face-to-face interview, between September 1 and November 30, 2019.The questionnaire was anonymous in order to ensure the highest degree of sincerity of the answers and was applied to a number of 630 tourists from the mountain region of Suceava county. 

The present study shows that most tourists who choose Suceava county as their destination, reside in neighboring counties, especially in the region of Moldova. An element of attractiveness is the lower prices compared to other tourist areas of the country. The economic facility of granting holiday vouchers and cards from the public domain in Romania, makes the tourist demand in non-polluting spaces increasing.   On the other hand, the statistical data confirm that the number of the agrotourism pensions in Suceava county are increasing from year to year; Suceava  is ranking in 2019 on the second place after Brasov county.The hypothesis confirms that rural tourism is a growing phenomenon, but the length of stay of tourists in the rural area is on average 1-3 days.

In conclusion, the following analysis of the results it is found that tourists are attracted by the beauty of the landscape of the existing cultural objectives, the local gastronomy, the hospitality of the hosts, all at a lower prices compared to areas of the great tourist interest in the country.

Keywords:  Rural Tourism, Mountain area, tourists, Suceava County

How to cite: Diacon, L. D., Efros, V., and Ciubotaru, C.: Perception of Rural Tourism From the Perspective of Tourists. Case study Mountain area of Suceava County, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-1381, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-1381, 2020.

Between 2017 and 2019, a prototype of a geological garden for the dissemination of Geological Sciences to the general public was created in the open-air spaces of the Department of Sciences of the Roma Tre University. This first nucleus is the result of a Citizen Science activity carried out by students of the High Schools of Rome and its province, conceived and guided by a group of University researchers and high school teachers, in collaboration with local institutions and some mining companies operating in the surroundings of Rome. Currently the prototype consists of six large rock samples representative of lithotypes cropping out in the Roman Campaign and in the nearby Central Apennines that allow to tell the evolution of the territory surrounding the city of Rome since about 15 Ma ago, with particular reference to the history of the Roman countryside in the Quaternary period. Guided tours for schools and a general public and events popularizing scientific culture at various scales have represented the main dissemination activities carried out so far. Currently the garden is being expanded and integrated with numerous plant species representative of the botanical heritage of the Lazio region.

How to cite: Corrado, S., Bollati, A., and Fabbri, M.: The Geogarden of the University Roma Tre: creation of a prototype of a Geological Garden of Lazio for the dissemination of Geological Sciences in Rome, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-2190, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-2190, 2020.