2015’s General Assembly (GA) was such a fantastic conference and community event! For a panorama of activities and discussions see our tagwall for #ECSAbcn collecting social media activity of the GA or the one on #CSinAction (which is still active!). A summary of the workshop on CS Data and Service Infrastructure on Friday is available on the ECSA blog.

ECSA General Assembly 2015
28-30 October 2015
Barcelona

And Geoffrey Haines-Stiles has finished to produce the video of this Barcelona meeting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrFKGBGCQ7s

With the growth of citizen science comes the challenge of coordinating people, projects and data. These challenges present a tremendous opportunity: with proper standardization, data can support multiple projects, allowing citizen science to address ever-grander issues and problems. On January 26-27, 2016, the European Commission’s Joint Research Center invited 20 international participants, including members of the ECSA, CSA and ACSA associations, to Ispra, Italy for a two-day workshop to discuss data and service infrastructures for citizen science.

JRC-Ispra, 26 – 27 January 2016

On 26 and 27 January 2016, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission invited international experts for a two-day workshop in Ispra (Italy) in order to discuss data and service infrastructures for Citizen Science. The participants were challenged to:

• discuss the relationships between existing databases including the SciStarter, the American Federal Database of Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing, the Atlas of Living Australia, and Citsci.org;
• identify the major requirements for Citizen Science project databases, including a new database to be hosted by the JRC;
• draft a reference model for analyzing and sharing citizen science tools and data, with early examples; and
• define a high-level roadmap with checkpoints for synchronizing already ongoing activities.

The event followed the Citizen Science Data and Service Infrastructures Workshop that the JRC co-organised together with the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) at the end of October 2015 (more details here).

Tuesday, 26 January 2015

• Proposed Citizen Science reference model with examples, reflection and refinements – facilitated by Jaume Piera and Arne Berre
• Discussions on Citizen Science project repositories, incl. archive for EU-funded projects – scene setters by Anne Bowser on Citizen Science project repositories in CSA (demos of the repository of the Commons Lab, CitSci.org and SciStarter.org), Peter Brenton on infrastructures & tools to support Citizen Science in Australia (online demo) and Luigi Ceccaroni on knowledge representation in Citizen Science
• Discussions on Citizen Science project repositories (continued) – scene setters by Sven Schade on JRC Citizen Science Repository and Emmanouela Panteri on DCAN-based Citizen Science repository

Wednesday, 27 January 2016

• Examples of existing Citizen Science platforms – incl. scene setters by Russel Scarpino on CitSci.org platform and plans for future development, Chris Higgins on COBWEB technology platform and future development needs and Jorge Vidal on CAPTOR: Collective Awareness Platform for Tropospheric Ozone Pollution
• Discussing ambitions in interconnecting platforms, identifying major challenges – scene setter by Claudia Göbel to propose a stakeholder analysis of Citizen Science landscape

The meeting was highly informative and gave much room for the required debates between JRC scientists, representatives of European research projects (FP7 and Horizon2020), as well as lead figures from ECSA, the American Citizen Science Association (CSA), the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA), and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

Following this meeting – and with a checkpoint during the upcoming First ECSA Conference 2016: Citizen Science – Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy (to be held 19-21 May 2016, in Berlin, Germany) – the participants agreed to take concrete steps to support both project and observational metadata standardization, and to increase collaborations. It was agreed:

For project metadata standardization

1. To continue mapping existing project metadata standards, including Darwin Core and the standards used to describe projects in different repositories, to develop a common vocabulary and ontology for talking about citizen science

2. To continue to support coordination between existing project repositories, through activities like developing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to share related information across repositories

3. To help coordinate a series of national repositories that are currently under development in Europe (included but not restricted to Germany, Austria, and Spain), through the activities listed above

For observational metadata standardization

4. To propose a high level reference model for citizen science observational data, based on existing models from the spatial data infrastructure (SDI), biodiversity and big data community, among others

5. To continue to support coordination between data hosting and management platforms through the development of APIs to share observational data, and demonstrating proof-of-concept data sharing

6. To prepare a discussion on data lifecycle management for citizen science, including an introduction to the topic and the possible projection of lifecycle models from other domains (e.g. Big Data and Spatial Data Infrastructures) onto observational data

For the collaboration at large

7. To conduct a stakeholder analysis on citizen science data and metadata standards in order to investigate current assumptions on requirements from both data providers, data users, and others

8. To continue to recruit stakeholders to join this initiative, like by requesting a citizen science Domain Working Group (DWG) within the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

9. To develop a collaboration platform to coordinate activities, and publish and share resources

10. To investigate the legal, organizational, semantic, and technical aspects of interoperability, as well as interoperability related to political context

While taking only an observatory role on some of these activities, 1000001 Labs contributions will be primarily included in the work on the ontology – with a view to increase 1000001 Labs’ role in related information sharing and participatory creation of scientific evidence. Support to other activities will be provided where appropriate.

Contact Information

To coordinate with or contribute to the CSA working group, please contact Anne Bowser (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, anne.bowser@wilsoncenter.org).

To coordinate with or contribute to the ECSA working group, please contact Luigi Ceccaroni (1000001 Labs, luigi@1000001labs.org).

To coordinate or contribute to the ACSA working group, please contact Peter Brenton (Atlas of Living Australia, Peter.Brenton@csiro.au).

For information on the Ispra workshop, please contact: Sven Schade (Digital Earth and Reference Data Unit – JRC.H06, sven.schade@jrc.ec.europa.eu).

Chapters by

Catherine Hoffman

Anne Bowser

Jessica L Cappadonna

Caren Cooper

Uta Wehn

Peter Brenton

Greg Newman

Katrin Vohland

Jaume Piera

Darlene Cavalier

Luigi Ceccaroni

and many others

–

Analyzing the Role of Citizen Science in Modern Research

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Amazon España

IGI Global

A book edited by Luigi Ceccaroni (Earthwatch, 1000001 Labs) and Jaume Piera (ICM-CSIC)

–

Foreword

Alan Irwin, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

The following chapters underline the fact that citizen science is now a significant international phenomenon. No longer simply a broad concept, but instead firmly taking shape in a range of specific actions, citizen science has emerged on a scale that few could have anticipated. As the contributors to this book discuss, professional and practitioner organizations have sprung up across the globe, tens – even hundreds – of thousands of participants are engaging in citizen science world-wide, and thousands of citizen science projects have been developed. And, just in case there should still be any doubt about the emergence of citizen science, even the Oxford English Dictionary has found it a place.

[…]

Table of content

Chapter 1

Civic Education and Citizen Science: Definitions, Categories, Knowledge Representation

Luigi Ceccaroni, 1000001 Labs, Spain

Anne Bowser, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, USA

Peter Brenton, Atlas of Living Australia, Australia

In chapter 1, the authors begin by proposing a slight re-framing of citizen science, which will contextualize the information presented in the rest of the book. The authors propose a perspective on and a definition for citizen science (which is alternative to the numerous previously documented definitions) as: “work undertaken by civic educators together with the general public to advance science, foster a broad scientific mentality or encourage democratic engagement in local concerns, which allows society to deal rationally with complex modern problems”. By explaining the rationale behind this definition, the authors also hope to raise awareness of the role that the meaning of words and phrases (semantics) plays in understanding and supporting citizen science. This chapter also explains how different organizations already use certain software solutions to organize knowledge about citizen science, how these systems can be classified and how they can facilitate or impede interoperability – the ability of machines to pass information between each other.

[…]

Chapter 2

More than Just Networking for Citizen Science: Examining Core Roles of Practitioner Organizations

Claudia Göbel, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany

Jessica L Cappadonna, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Gregory J Newman, Colorado State University, USA

Jian Zhang, East China Normal University, China

Katrin Vohland, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany

In chapter 2, the authors show how, with recent advances in technology, citizen-science activity is growing rapidly around the world and diversifies into new disciplines. This expansion is accompanied by the formation of associations and networks dedicated to citizen-science practitioners, which aim to support citizen science as a research approach. This chapter examines how four such organizations in the United States, Europe, Australia, and China have begun to take shape, and are working with citizen-science communities and stakeholders in their respective regions and globally. Challenges and future plans of these groups are also discussed. This chapter identifies three core roles of citizen-science practitioner organization: (1) establishing communities of practitioners; (2) building expertise through the sharing of existing knowledge and the development of new knowledge; and (3) representing community interests. The authors aim then to stimulate further research, discussion and critical reflection on these associations and networks in the emerging citizen-science landscape.

[…]

Chapter 3

SciStarter 2.0: A Digital Platform to Foster and Study Sustained Engagement in Citizen Science

Catherine Hoffman, SciStarter, USA

Caren B. Cooper, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, USA

Eric B Kennedy, School for the Future of Innovation in Society – Arizona State University, USA

Mahmud Farooque, Arizona State University, USA

Darlene Cavalier, Arizona State University, USA

In chapter 3, the authors focus on how SciStarter has developed a new digital infrastructure to support sustained engagement in citizen science, and research into the behaviors and motivations of participants. The new digital infrastructure of SciStarter includes integrated registration and contribution tracking tools to make it easier to participate in multiple projects, enhanced GIS information to promote locally relevant projects, an online personal dashboard to keep track of contributions, and the use of these tools (integrated registration, GIS, dashboard) by project owners and researchers to better understand and respond to the needs and interests of citizen-science participants. In this chapter, the authors explore how these new tools build pathways to participatory policymaking, expand access to informal STEM experiences, and lower barriers to citizen science. The chapter concludes with a design for a citizen-science future with increased access to tools, trackable participation, and integrated competencies.

[…]

Chapter 4

What Drives Citizens to Engage in ICT-enabled Citizen Science?: Case Study of Online Amateur Weather Networks

Mohammad Gharesifard, UNESCO-IHE, The Netherlands

Uta Wehn, UNESCO-IHE, The Netherlands

In chapter 4, the authors show that in order for citizen-science initiatives to pan out well, various actors need to be willing to engage in citizen-science activities. The authors’ particular interest lies with the citizens and their motivations to participate in technology-enabled citizen science since without citizen participation there is no citizen-science activity. The authors examine in detail a particular case: citizens’ willingness to collect weather-related data using personal weather stations and share them via online amateur weather networks. To better understand what determines citizens’ interest to participate in such online networks and how their activities could be up-scaled to address hydro-meteorological data gaps, the authors use the lens of a decision-making theory to guide their empirical research.

[…]

Chapter 5

The Social Function of Citizen Science: Developing Researchers, Developing Citizens

Luis Arnoldo Ordóñez Vela, Fundación InterConectados, Venezuela

Enrico Bocciolesi, eCampus University, Italy

Giovanna Lombardi, Universidad Central de Venezuela – Facultad de Ciencias, Venezuela

Robin M. Urquhart, Scotland

Chapter 5 focuses on the risk that, when introduced in social environments different from those in the Global North where it originated, citizen science may be subject to the error of providing the right answer to the wrong question. To avoid this type of errors, it is necessary to train those who participate in citizen-science studies: citizens as well as researchers. Otherwise, we may encounter new forms of scientific dependence that benefit knowledge accumulation and policy decision-making in the Global North, without contributing to the quality of life of those who carry out the studies. This chapter analyzes the relationship between civic development, citizen science and ways of implementing research conclusions through public policies, given the characteristics of political and citizen participation in the Global South. Here, the introduction of citizen science is seen as an opportunity to construct a more inclusive and participatory society, and to reduce the risk of returning to paternalistic, passivity-inducing and purely instrumental approaches to development.

[…]

Chapter 6

Geographical Information Systems in Modern Citizen Science

Laia Subirats, Eurecat, Spain

Joana Simoes, Geocat, Spain

Alexander Steblin, Eurecat, Spain

Chapter 6 shows how citizen-science initiatives have been known to exist for a long time, but only recently they were further enhanced thanks to technological and societal developments, such as the availability of mobile devices, the widespread use of the internet and the low cost of location devices. These developments shaped the geographic information system (GIS) world as it is known today: a group of technologies that allows retrieving, storing, analyzing and sharing spatial information, by people who are not necessarily GIS professionals. This chapter starts with a general background about GIS, adding then more detail in topics of particular relevance in the context of citizen science. The rest of the chapter is focused on reviewing and classifying the use of GIS in citizen-science initiatives; and some use cases are described in order to provide practical examples of the use of these technologies for solving specific spatial problems. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the future of GIS in citizen science, in the light of current technological trends.

[…]

Chapter 7

Citizen Science and its Role in Sustainable Development: Status, Trends, Issues and Opportunities

Hai-Ying Liu, Norwegian Institute for Air Research, Norway

Mike Kobernus, Norwegian Institute for Air Research, Norway

Chapter 7 aims to analyze the role of citizen science in sustainable development, including case studies implementation, with specific focus on the suitability of citizen science in environmental sustainability. The authors present solutions and recommendations for designing and executing citizen-science initiatives, and thoughts on the future role of citizen science. Firstly, the authors review the state of citizen science in sustainable development and explore the potential of citizen science for environmental research and governance. Secondly, the authors identify and elaborate on the core components that support the role of citizen science. Thirdly, using several citizens’ observatories studies from various regions in Europe and within diverse environmental fields, the authors highlight the lessons learned, and reflect on major outcomes, challenges and opportunities.

[…]

Chapter 8

Social Context of Citizen Science Projects

Patricia Tiago, Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes, Portugal

Chapter 8 provides a brief history of citizen science in our societies, identifies the main stakeholders involved in projects of this topic, and analyzes the main points to take into consideration, from a social perspective, when designing a citizen-science project: communicating; recruiting and motivating participants; fostering innovation, interdisciplinarity and group dynamics; promoting cultural changes, healthy habits, inclusion, awareness and education; and guiding policy goals and decisions. Different governance structures, and a coexistence of different approaches, are analyzed together with how they suit different communities and scientific studies.

[…]

Chapter 9

Citizen Observatories as Advanced Learning Environments

Josep M. Mominó, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Spain

Jaume Piera, Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), Spain

Elena Jurado, 1000001 Labs, Spain

Chapter 9 focuses particular attention on learning dynamics that are common to citizen observatories, the technology-driven environments where a diverse range of tools is developed, such as web portals, smartphone apps, monitoring devices, and allows the growth of citizen-science projects, particularly those with the principal objective of a large-scale participation of people, covering large geographical areas and long periods of time. These observatories integrate the latest information and communication technologies (ICT) to digitally connect the citizens, improve their observational capabilities and provide information flows. The concept of citizen observatories offers great possibilities as an educational experience, precisely due to the opportunities offered by the participation of citizens, with different levels and roles, in terms of active collaboration, and in shared processes of knowledge creation. This is especially clear when we pay attention to the complexity of the challenges education must face today, within the framework of a society of knowledge.

[…]

Chapter 10

The Role of Citizen Science in Environmental Education: A Critical Exploration of the Environmental Citizen Science Experience

Ria Dunkley, Cardiff University, UK

Chapter 10 focuses on the role of citizen science in environmental education. Citizen science is increasing in popularity and is used by academics, communities and a wide range of non-governmental organizations. Many within the field of environmental education see the convergence of citizen science, science education and environmental education as a major opportunity for enhancing sustainable thinking and behaviors. Through synthesizing existing literature, policy documents and educational materials, this chapter critically reflects upon the pedagogic potential of the convergence of citizen science and environmental education. It also challenges the notion that environmentally concerned citizen-science projects enhance awareness of ecological issues and encourage the adoption of more sustainable behaviors. The author draws upon insights from practical projects to explore the motivations and experiences of citizen scientists; and discusses the apparent impacts of involvement in citizen science upon the individual in the development of environmental citizenship.

[…]

Chapter 11

Citizen-driven Geographic Information Science

Thomas J. Lampoltshammer, Danube University Krems, Austria

Johannes Scholz, Graz University of Technology, Austria

Chapter 11 shows how global environmental changes put society in front of new challenges, and how immediate and intense actions have to be undertaken in order to foster necessary progress in global sustainability research. The technological infrastructure has reached a status of ubiquitous computing and virtually unlimited data availability. Yet, the dynamic nature of the global environment makes continuous and in-situ monitoring challenging. Citizen-driven geographic information science can bridge this gap by building on inputs, observations, and the wisdom of the crowd, represented by the citizens themselves. This chapter argues for the important role of citizen science in geographic information science, presents its position in current research, and discusses future potential research streams, based on the participation by and collaboration with citizens. In particular, the chapter sheds light on three major pillars of the future of citizen-driven geographic information science, namely: big geo-data; education; and open science.

[…]

Chapter 12

Can Citizen Science Seriously Contribute to Policy Development?: A Decision Maker’s View

Colin Chapman, Welsh Government, UK

Crona Hodges, Aberystwyth University, UK

Chapter 12 considers the potential for citizen science to contribute to policy development. A background to evidence-based policy making is given, and the requirement for data to be robust, reliable and, increasingly, cost-effective is noted. The potential for the use of ‘co-design’ strategies with stakeholders, to add value to their engagement as well as provide more meaningful data that can contribute to policy development, is presented and discussed. Barriers to uptake can be institutional and the quality of data used in evidence-based policy making will always need to be fully assured. Data must be appropriate to the decision making process at hand and there is potential for citizen science to fill important, existing data-gaps.

[…]

Chapter 13

Smart Activation of Citizens: Opportunities and Challenges for Scientific Research

Maria Gilda Pimentel Esteves, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Jano Moreira de Souza, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Alexandre Prestes Uchoa, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Carla Viana Pereira, Empresa de Tecnologia e Informações da Previdência Social – DATAPREV, Brazil

Marcio Antelio, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Chapter 13 focuses on how, by “activating” the citizen’s engagement in the research process, the scientific community has a smart way to benefit from the wisdom of the “crowd”. There are countless success stories in which citizens participate, contributing with their knowledge, cognitive capacity, creativity, opinion, and skills. However, for many scientists, the lack of familiarity with the particular nature of citizen participation, which is usually anonymous and volatile, turns into a barrier for its adoption. This chapter presents a problem-based typology for citizen-science projects that aims to help scientists to choose the best strategy for engaging and counting on citizen participation based on the scientific problem at hand; and some examples are included. Moreover, the chapter discusses the main challenges for researchers who intend to start involving the citizens in order to solve their specific scientific needs.

[…]

Chapter 14

Surface Water Information Collection: Volunteers Keep the Great Lakes Great

Mark Gillingham, Hermit’s Peak Watershed Alliance, USA

Chapter 14’s starting premise is that for decades the United States Environmental Protection Agency region subsuming most of the Great Lakes watershed has been partially monitored by private citizens, but collected data have been underutilized by water managers, scientists, and policymakers. Today, citizens with only a smartphone can dramatically increase our understanding of surface water, help managers and policymakers, and educate the general public about the quality of water. The US Clean Water Act and National Strategy for Civil Earth Observations have helped to coordinate citizen scientists and direct funds to surface-water monitoring. And more contributors are being solicited and trained to help with the enormous task of monitoring lakes and streams. At the same time, technology allows citizens with a smartphone to accomplish what previously required experts in a lab: to act for clean water!

[…]

How to cite the book:

How to cite a chapter of the book (example):

The value of information

The goal of this book is to help educators and researchers to increase the value of the information they deliver to others and to open up opportunities for others to learn and engage in the domain of citizen science. Some of the chapters of the book explain how to teach people about a scientific subject in ways that make what is learned more likely to influence subsequent decisions which involves citizens. In other chapters, the authors show that relatively simple principles can help educators and researchers to deliver the kinds of information that make desired learning and engaging outcomes, often in terms of citizen activities, more likely.

Typical activities included in citizen science range from data collection and analysis to information access and delivery. It is then important to define data, information, and also the related concepts of knowledge and competence; and their relationships to one another. Understanding their differences is a key to increasing knowledge and competence. Data are collected and analyzed to create information suitable for making decisions, while knowledge is derived from extensive amounts of experience dealing with information on a subject. Information is what educators and researchers can convey to others directly. The same is not true for knowledge or competence. Knowledge is memories of how concepts and objects are related to one another. Knowledge requires information. Conveying information is the means by which educators and researchers can increase others’ knowledge. Competence is the ability to perform a task in a particular way. A competent choice is one that is consistent with a relevant set of facts (say, about water quality) and that is in sufficient alignment with a chosen criterion (e.g., how one feels about tradeoffs between environmental sustainability and economic growth). Competence is always with respect to a task and an evaluative criterion. and requires knowledge. Educators’ and researchers’ information can increase citizens’ competence only if the citizens think about the information in ways that transform it into applicable types of knowledge. Educators and researchers can achieve their objectives more effectively and efficiently by understanding what kinds of information are more relevant to increasing specific competences.

When collecting data, activities typically involved are voluntary, active and conscious with respect to citizen science, even if some activities do not include all these characteristics, for example:

• some school activities are not voluntary for the participant students;
• in some cases, citizens are passively wearing/carrying/using a sensor device and might be collecting data in a form which is not active;
• when your tweets are mined, you are not conscious of your participation in citizen-science projects.

Often, data collection means citizens using lightweight and accessible sensor technologies to gather, and then share, data in order to collectively monitor the environment. Data-collection technologies range from specific sensors or applications that augment mobile phones to increase their functionality, to dedicated, smart and connected devices. Although there has been and there is a vast number of citizen-sensing projects (e.g., instigated by civic educators), modern, large-scale research, in which citizen science has a role, demands new applications (software solutions or systems), and better integration within and among different organizations collecting and using scientific information.

An important aspect in citizen-science data analysis, processing and interpretation is quality control. The data are coming from various sources and are collected under different conditions, which influence the quality of the observations and their use. For wider use it is required to validate the observations by means of data quality-control procedures including giving quality flags as is normal practice in data management.

Part of the quality control is also related to the fact that people provide (in a more or less voluntary, active or conscious way) sufficient metadata and context data, such as time, location, name, instrument, when uploading their observations to project databases. This meta-documentation provides essential information next to the data themselves. Sensing technologies can sometimes automatically provide contextual information, which is an essential requirement for personalization and for real-time data-quality validation. Mobile applications can check in real time if a measurement is taken correctly (taking into account, for example, position, orientation and temperature). Another aspect to take into account in quality control is the potential knowledge transfer among participants. Participants with more expertise may help in validating or providing additional information on observations reported by new users.

For a citizen-centered project to bring about benefits to society a critical aspect is information access. For example, by sharing information about environmental factors, citizens can become aware of how their lifestyles affect the ecosystem, identify local issues such as air pollution, and learn more and act on their environment. However, there are challenges associated to information delivery and information access.

It is important to focus on how to deliver information more effectively. The starting premise is that a person’s ability to pay attention to information is extremely limited. Unchangeable aspects of human biology lead people to ignore almost all of the information to which they are, or could be, exposed. Since learning and engaging require attention, educators and researchers who want to increase citizens’ knowledge or competence have to find ways to get their attention.

A common requirement for obtaining attention is citizens perceiving information as being highly relevant to their immediate needs. The ineffectiveness of many educational and engagement strategies can be linked to mistaken beliefs about how citizens perceive the value of different kinds of information. Citizens often perceive as abstract or uncertain the benefits of learning and engaging about many of the things about which educators and researchers are. Educators and researchers who fail to recognize these perceptions tend to overwhelm citizens with information that they do not want and will not use.

With the goal of helping educators and researchers in mind, it is important to recognize that many educators and researchers channel their energies into ineffective strategies that do little for the improvement of the knowledge, or the increase of the competences, that motivated them to develop educational or research strategies in the first place. Educational and research ineffectiveness occur because many educators and researchers are mistaken about how people learn and make decisions. Mistaken beliefs lead many educators and researchers to offer information that others do not value or cannot use.

In the book, the authors examine relationships among the information to which people are exposed, the knowledge that such information produces, and knowledge’s effect on important competences. The book’s central proposition is that educators and researchers can be much more effective if they know more about how people think and learn about science, about ways to differentiate between information to which prospective learners and citizens in general will pay attention and information that these same people will ignore.

It is important to focus particular attention on learning dynamics that are common to citizen science; and offer ways for educators and researchers to increase the value and effectiveness of their educational and engagement strategies. It is important to show educators and researchers how to develop more effective ways of increasing useful kinds of knowledge in a wide range of citizen-science contexts, and relative to three components: issue complexity, stakeholder roles and learning/engaging costs.

By complexity, we mean that the domain of citizen science has diverse and occasionally contradictory components, experienced by an equally diverse range of communities; and, when a domain is complex, educators and researchers have to choose how to frame it (i.e., they have to choose how to formally represent it and what parts of the topic to emphasize). Choices about how to frame issues in citizen science will impact the effectiveness of the communication and exchange of information, and determine whether or not that information has any subsequent effect on others’ knowledge and competence. In this respect, we offer a vision in which, even if citizen science moves towards more and more formal knowledge-representation and the ability to carry out automatic reasoning by machines, humans are responsible for checking whether any given knowledge representation is still an accurate reflection of reality.

If we focus on stakeholder roles, we can find a variety of situations to be taken into account. A member of the board of directors has different roles than do individual members of an association. Legislators have different roles than citizens who hold no elective offices. These role differences mean that information that increases a policy maker’s competence at his most important tasks may have little value to people with different roles (say, a member of a school board), and vice versa. Understanding stakeholder roles can help educators and researchers to direct information to more valuable ends.

If we focus on learning and engaging costs, it is important to note that increasing knowledge or competence can take a lot of work. Educators and researchers have to put effort into developing and implementing their strategies. Citizens have to devote resources to learning and engaging. Everyone involved in educational and engagement efforts pays costs of one kind or another. For some, the costs are sacrificed time and effort. For others, money is the main expense. These costs alter the net benefit of different types of information to different kinds of people. Understanding different types of learning and engaging costs reveals an important implication for educators and researchers: even if people share important values and stakeholder roles, they may disagree about whether the costs of an educational or engagement effort are worth paying because some people face greater costs than others. Educators and researchers can use this kind of knowledge to elicit broader participation in important educational endeavors and to accomplish important educational and engagement goals more efficiently.

If you’re concerned about access to this book, please read our notes on this matter here: [http://www.1000001labs.org/analyzing-the-role-of-citizen-science-in-modern-research-book-criticism/].

Background

Citizen science draws from different fields, such as environmental sciences, biological sciences, Earth observation, crowdsourcing, do-it-yourself approaches, participatory science, environmental mapping, intelligent data-analysis, social sciences and artificial intelligence. Initiatives and projects based on citizen-science are being developed at local, national and global levels, and are reaching out to ordinary citizens and decision makers for them to engage and take part in science together with researchers. Prominent examples of citizen-science projects are the European citizens’ observatories [http://www.citizen-obs.eu/]. Citizens are now valued as a key component in the global transition towards a sustainable development, and citizen science aims to: enhance capacities with regard to citizens’ initiatives; collect and analyze data from citizens; identify good practices and challenges, such as data accessibility and interoperability; and deliver information to decision makers and, importantly, back to the citizens.

Citizen science can support decision makers by intensifying the dialogue at different scales: from improving early-warning systems, to assisting grassroots activities to protect an endangered species, to supporting environment-related policy targets. It provides the methodology and tools to listen to and engage with citizens on issues such as environmental sustainability, and thus acquire essential local knowledge to determine if national and international environmental programs are working.

Objective of the book

This book looks to:

• discuss how to formalize the new discipline of citizen science in its early stages;
• allow everyone in the research community to find out what everyone else has been doing in citizen science;
• allow greater cooperation among citizen-science initiatives.

It also addresses topics which are not often explored; specifically it addresses:

• how citizen science relates with other sciences;
• data harmonization, describing how citizen science can be integrated with existing standards.

Based on the analysis of existing experiences, it defines best practices in the methodologies to set up and implement citizen-science initiatives, especially at the international level. Citizen science will be formally defined through the description of its relation with the following areas of knowledge: Earth observation, environment quality, education, socioeconomic benefits, information acquisition, information processing and interpretation, information delivery, data interoperability, standards, novel low-cost technology, collaboration and teamwork, security, and privacy.

This book aims to be an essential reference source about how novel, low-cost technology might be used in citizen science, providing landmarks and guidelines to decision makers and researchers exploring this new territory in knowledge and working at the cutting edge of this field. It will provide inspiration to researchers who designed a tool with one specific use in mind, to generalize it to other uses and to realize the social innovation potential when this tool is used in citizen observatories.

The book will help to relax the constraints of governing metaphors in science. Society is failing to see the citizen-science revolution coming, in part because science’s governing metaphor is drawn from the idea of the scientific document in highly specialized journals: expensive materials and methods, not people. Consequently, most science is not considering low-cost instruments, alternative ways of publishing and social networks.

Even if citizen science is not a plug-and-play solution to sustainability, this book will help to perceive important developments and possibilities, such as that individuals are taking an active role in the transition to a sustainable society, and in helping to protect and improve health and the environment; and will do this not assuming that traditional trends will continue to follow their trajectory. Sciences, in the last century, have been characterized by their increasing complexity: an obvious and indisputable trend. Despite this fact, this book will document the rise of citizen science, whose simplicity, openness and ability to empower and engage citizens make it perfect for a society which is already been changed by Facebook and the iPhone.

Finally, this book considers the risks of innovating our way out of strong dependency on traditional science only to be plunged into chaos when the world suddenly finds itself dealing with different approaches to science at the same time. Because every new solution often hides its own set of problems, one objective of this book is to define paths to conciliate and mutually strengthen traditional and citizen science.

Audience

Academicians, researchers, policy makers, technology developers and government officials aiming at developing a citizen- or participatory-science initiative will find this text useful in furthering their exposure to pertinent topics and research efforts in this field.

Sergi Pons presents his thesis on “do-it-yourself instruments and data processing methods for developing marine citizen observatories“.

The motivation behind the thesis is related to the need to optimize the monitoring of oceanographic processes. In oceanography, data is not being sampled with the appropriate frequency and spatial resolution. If aliasing occurs, the signal reconstructed from samples is different from the original continuous signal. The traditional method of turning data into knowledge relies on manual analysis and interpretation. For long-term monitoring applications, this form of proceeding is inefficient and expensive. Present technology cannot offer anti-aliasing filters at the desired cut-off frequencies.

Citizen science is a tool that has been underutilized. We believe that open-source software coupled with low-cost do-it-yourself hardware can help to close the gap between science and citizens in the oceanographic field.

Objectives of the thesis:

• Demonstrate how citizen science tools (based on open source software and low-cost hardware) are effectively applied to solve
  the requirements for monitoring oceanographic processes.
• Develop a pioneering work in citizen-science techniques, building a foundation for future more sophisticated techniques.
• Demonstrate how open-source software and low-cost hardware are effectively applied to oceanographic research and show how this relates to citizen science.

Conclusions of the thesis:

Open-source software and low-cost do-it-yourself hardware:
– offer better results than previous methodologies;
– use less resources (human and technical) than previous methodologies;
– allow to apply techniques already used in other fields to oceanography;
– open the doors to implicate citizens in gathering new data and improve existing techniques.

The Web is a source of rich and varied content. If that content, or at least the important data within it, could be accessible not only to humans but to computers as well, it could then be filtered, grouped, analyzed, and served to citizens in ways humans would be hard-pressed or unable to achieve themselves. The Semantic Web transformed the World Wide Web into exactly that sort of system. This idea is full of both technical possibilities and market opportunities (Bonner, 2002).

Like its predecessor, the Semantic Web rides on the Internet backbone and uses HTTP’s simple methods (get, post, and put) to transfer resources located and addressed through unique universal resource identifiers (URIs). But whereas the content presented on the World Wide Web is designed almost entirely with people in mind, the content of the Semantic Web is intended to be optimally accessible and comprehensible to automated software agents. The simple change of augmenting human-readable content with machine-comprehensible content (or the production of pages or even entire sites of purely machine-oriented content) could have a huge effect.

Consider the seemingly simple task of determining a company’s mailing address from the “Contact us” or “About us” page of its website. If a human were going to perform that task herself, she would navigate to the page, then scan the page until she located the address. A software program, lacking the extraordinary pattern recognition skills that make the task child’s play for a human, would have a harder time finding the address. Unless the address is preceded by a specific label such as Mailing Address Starts Here: and followed by Mailing Address Ends Here and a program is coded accordingly, it would be very difficult to come up with an algorithm that could correctly parse an unknown address out of the stream of ASCII characters that make up a Web page. A Web page author could make the task a lot easier by embedding the address in a block of XML code:

<address>

<street> 52 Alzina Street </street>

<city> Barcelona </city>

<province> Barcelona </province>

<postal code> 08024 </postal code>

</address>

Such coding is more machine-readable than straight HTML, because a program could scan the page’s code for an XML-encoded address and then parse the XML to extract the address. But that still presupposes that the program doing the scanning knows exactly what definition of an address object will appear on the page. What if the company is headquartered in New York City rather than Barcelona? The page could use a different definition of an address object, substituting zip for postal code or state for province. Or what if the page contained several address objects, some pointing to post office boxes and some to various mailing addresses within the company? Any software program trying to determine the address of the company’s headquarters is likely to fail without more guidance.

The Semantic Web aims to provide that guidance in the form of encoded metadata that provide a context for Web-based data. Its goal is to turn the Internet into a vast, decentralized, machine-readable database. The owners of data will be able to determine who has access, using standard HTML access control methods. And as a data consumer, a citizen will be able to indicate the sources whose data she trusts. Even with limits imposed by both sides, any given Semantic Web application will have access to a vast range of data sources.

The possibilities for Semantic-Web–based software are nearly boundless: complex business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions with no human intervention; aggregation, amalgamation and mining of research and historical data in ways beyond human capability; transparent, on-the-fly assembly, instantiation, and linking of distributed virtual applications; and intelligent sifting through data from millions of connected computers.

References

Bonner, P. The Semantic Web. PC Magazine. July 1, 2002.

Laia Subirats presents her thesis on:

The motivation behind the thesis is related to the negative impact of neurological diseases on human society.

Objectives of the thesis:

• To generate an automated translation of Medical Health Records (MHRs) to international standards promoted by the WHO
• To represent all concepts involved using an ontology
• To provide new visualization interfaces to allow clinicians to understand both the status and evolution of individuals and populations
• To improve the prognosis through:
  – developing a case-based reasoning system with a time-aware similarity measure; and
  – providing a better understanding of the temporal context of attributes
• To study the role played by time in four different prediction domains using case-based reasoning
• To present a novel approach for Case-based Prognosis using Temporal Abstractions (CAPTA)
• To detail the case description and the temporal representation
• To propose a similarity measure with a novel temporal representation
• To evaluate the approach in four domains and to compare the evaluation with a baseline of existing methods
• To describe a visualization of CAPTA

Conclusions of the thesis:

• An automated translation of MHRs to international standards promoted by the WHO has been generated.
• All concepts involved are represented using an ontology.
• Professionals found the monitoring system useful to generate new knowledge and solving interoperability problems.
• People with disabilities found helpful to enrich personal knowledge with the experiences of other users and to perform online follow up questionnaires after clinical discharge. As a consequence, the monitoring system has potential to promote user empowerment and making decisions with a more informed opinion.
• Regarding prognosis and MAE, CAPTA is clearly better than the state of the art in 3 domains and equal in 1 domain; and regarding accuracy, CAPTA is equal in three domains and has clearly a better accuracy in one domain.
• CAPTA is highly flexible and different temporal representations can be used in different data sets.

Future work:

• Regarding interoperability, we are planning to extend the use of the proposed approach for QALYs evolution in periodic comprehensive evaluations of people with disabilities of neurological origin.
• The monitoring system will be promoted at the Institut Guttmann – Neurorehabilitation Hospital among patients and clinical staff (especially psychologists and social workers). It is also planned to involve other institutions such as other reference healthcare centers, patient organizations, public health systems, and private enterprises.
• Prognosis will be included in the monitoring system and will be validated by the clinical staff. In addition, the indexing method of the time-series will be improved in order to provide minimal space consumption and computational complexity. The interface will be able to be customized (1) by selecting which attribute is to be predicted, and (2) selecting the number of similar cases shown.

The “Musical Tentacle” is a project by Citclops, 1000001 Labs, CSIC, Eurecat, and thethings.iO to create sound from and artistically express scientific data used to measure the transparency of the sea water. It uses the KdUINO a low-cost Arduino-based buoy from the Citclops project designed for the monitoring of natural-water quality, which environmental-science grad students and do-it-yourself sea enthusiasts can build. Thanks to a combination of several factors (the real-time component of the monitoring, the participation of the citizens, the development and implementation in existing low-cost prototypes) Musical Tentacle offers a unique opportunity to audio-visually experience variations in the transparency of our seas. The Musical Tentacle idea was inspired by the Citclops European project, in which scientists, looking to encourage undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate interest in sea monitoring, came up with a design for a low-cost buoy that could be built entirely from cheap components or prepackaged kits. The result is a water-resistant box measuring about 13 x 13 x 20 centimeters, just large enough to fit a basic, open-source electronics prototyping platform and communications payload, and a battery. Sensors, which measure the light in the water, are connected via cable to the box. The buoy is capable of connecting to a mobile device, so that data gathered in the water can be collected wirelessly.

When the light plays music under the sea

1000001 Labs | Citclops | Sonar+D | Musical Tentacle

Authors:
• Alexander Steblin (Citclops, Eurecat)
• Arturo Tejeda (1000001 Labs)
• Filip Velickovski (Citclops, Eurecat)
• Jaume Piera (Citclops, CSIC)
• Jordi Bruña (1000001 Labs)
• Lucas Eznarriaga (1000001 Labs)
• Luigi Ceccaroni (Citclops, 1000001 Labs)
• Marc Pous (1000001 Labs, thethings.iO)
• Raúl Bardají (Citclops, CSIC)

If you want to check out what Musical Tentacle is up to at  Sonar +D conference, check out:

• http://webmap.citclops.eu/musical-tentacle/static/client/beat.html for audio
• http://webmap.citclops.eu/musical-tentacle/static/client/tentacle.html for visualization

Scientific data are obtained by the KdUINO buoy designed in the citizen science project Citclops [www.citclops.eu]. This buoy can be constructed entirely from readily available and inexpensive electronic-components and kits. The sensors that measure the light in the water are controlled by an Arduino board, which in turn is able to connect to a mobile device, so that data collected in the water are automatically, wirelessly transmitted. Musical Tentacle uses the sensor measurements and offers a unique opportunity to audio-visually experience variations in the transparency of our seas.

The Musical Tentacle is in the Sónar+D pavilion, inside the “STARTS – European Commission” room. If you have the chance, get close to him and experience the transformation of scientific data into graphic art and music.

Luigi Ceccaroni talks about participatory science to understand the ecological status of surface marine waters at the second International Ocean Research conference  (One Planet One Ocean) taking place in Barcelona, at the CCIB – Barcelona International Convention Centre, on November 16th and 18th, 2014.

As with terrestrial life, plankton is a complex “ecosystem” consisting of forms of life very different from each other; and it is the base ring of the food chain for all marine species. It is due to phytoplankton (and in particular the diatoms) that there is plenty of oxygen on Earth: one-third of all the oxygen produced comes from the oceans, through the action of these tiny algae. Only two-thirds of the oxygen comes from the forests. The same thing applies to the absorption of carbon dioxide: a third of the CO2 is absorbed by the phytoplankton, through photosynthesis. The ocean, that is, behaves exactly like a forest: in its surface layer there are “prairies” and “woods”, which absorb carbon dioxide and emit large amounts of oxygen. This production is not homogeneous: so as on earth there are green areas and desert areas, also in the seas there are areas with varying degrees of plankton.

It is important to note that the carbon of the air absorbed by plankton ends up almost all on the sea floor. Through the food chain, in fact, (or even through the incorporation in the tiny shells of diatoms) carbon moves from one life form to another, from the smallest fish to larger and larger predators, until, with their deaths, falls to the bottom. It is then easy to see how necessary it is that this mechanism continues to function, and that the plankton is not threatened by marine pollution. Plankton, algal biomass and chlorophyll are indeed proxies of theecological status of surface marine waters and are related to indicators, such as the transparency and color of the water, which can be measured directly also by citizens and skippers, in different contexts, thanks to the Citclops project and theBarcelona World Race.

In-situ transparency measures of sea waters are based on observations by the Secchi disk (SD), the KdUINO buoy and other novel, low-cost instruments; while in-situ colormeasurements are based on the Forel-Ule (FU) scale, which isused to determine the color of water bodies, in limnology and oceanography. Information on color is then collected by the Citclops – Citizen water monitoring app and other low-cost sensors, and will be integrated in the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

Measuring simple indicators, such as transparency and color, contributes to determine the ecological status of surface marine waters. These indicators are related to chlorophyll, algal biomass and organic compounds. To determine the ecological status of surface waters, the quantification of the presence of pollutants, such as accumulations of plastic debris, is also necessary. Currently, transparency and color measures are based on optical imaging, the Secchi-disk depth and the Forel-Ule (FU) scale. Measures of accumulations of plastic debris are based on analysis of images of the sea surface.

To improve the assessment of the ecological status of water bodies, the Citclops (Citizens’ Observatory for Coast and Ocean Optical Monitoring) European action (2012-2015) has developed a mobile application that allows citizens to contribute to measuring water bodies’ optical properties via participatory science.

This event, the One Planet One Ocean Conference (IORC), is an opportunity for the scientific community to come together to plan the coming decade of international collaboration in marine science and technology, with a view to improving ocean governance. The inaugural IORC was held in June 2005, when the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC-UNESCO) with The Oceanography Society (TOS), brought attendees together to discuss expected developments in marine sciences in the decade that followed.

Full list of presentations and poster:

• Luigi Ceccaroni (Citclops), Laia Subirats (BDigital), Marcel Wernand (NIOZ), Stéfani Novoa (NIOZ), Jaume Piera (ICM-CSIC), Roger Farrés (Kinetical), Ivan Price (Noveltis) and the Citclops consortium. Participatory science to understand the ecological status of surface marine waters. Abstract @ Workshop 5 (WS5) Global reporting of assessments of the status of marine environments, November 16, 2014; and abstract @ Theme Session T2.TS5 Operationalizing Ecosystem-based Management: the challenges of translating scientific knowledge into decision tools for integrated management, November 18, 2014.
• Jaume Piera, Raul Bardají, Carine Simon, Luigi Ceccaroni and the Citclops Consortium. Citizen science and do it yourself technologies: a new way to observe coastal environments. Abstract @ Workshop 8 (WS8) Promoting communication within the early career marine scientists, November 16, 2014.
• Luigi Ceccaroni, Marcel Wernand, Laia Subirats, Jaume Piera, Roger Farrés, Ivan Price, Alexander Steblin and the Citclops Consortium. Extending historic water-quality data sets, using old-fashioned techniques, citizen science and smartphones. Poster, November 17 and 19, 2014.

Data Clippers, the project 1000001 Labs sent to Wired, has been selected for the semi-final of Hack The Expo, where the 21 projects that will participate in the final on October 4th in Milan will be chosen.

We will present the project at the ExpoGate’s Leonardo Space in Via Beltrami 2 (Castle Square) at 10.30 am Tuesday, September 30.

We will have 3 minutes to present our idea, answer their questions and convince them that our one is one of the 21 projects to bring to the final on Saturday, October 4th. We are getting ready!

We will try to create together with Wired part of the program of FuoriExpo, the alternative schedule at the Universal Exposition of 2015.

“Take the blue pill, the story ends: tomorrow you’ll wake up in your room, and believe what you want. Take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes .” This time to propose to ingest one of the two pills is not Morpheus but Wired, asking us not to wake up and get out of the Matrix, but hacking the Expo and make it ours. A call of the wild that they called Hack the Expo: to which they dedicated the April issue, a section of the site and which now takes the form of a live event that will be held in Milan in October, open to designers, companies, students, groups of people of every field of knowledge, experience, tired of waiting for solutions from outside and who want to do for themselves.

Stealing thoughts and words from Wired’s artistic director, Franco Bolelli , “for us the universal exhibition is a unique opportunity to liberate those who make and build, who expand borders, those who invent, make mistakes and innovate, from the traps of the marginality, albeit prestigious, of the underground, and finally put them at the center of the scene. Not as whimsical, brilliant creative people, but as evolutionary prototypes, as new, more advanced, more comprehensive models of thought, planning, communication, life.”

We have chosen the red pill and are finding out “how deep the rabbit hole” of Hack the Expo is.

Here is the project we sent to hack the Universal Exhibition:

One Million and One Labs is aiming at launching an Aquatic Monitoring Hackerspace, and a fleet of monitoring buoys that are cheap, small, and ultra-efficient. Their up-to-the-minute measurements of the rivers and seas will give us data that could upend industries, transform economies, have a social and environmental impact, and even help in living tomorrow.

It is remarkable how few new data of the aquatic environment and of aquatic biodiversity we get to lay eyes on. In Europe, after several governments cut their monitoring budget, to know the quality of the water is even more difficult. Because so few data make their way from the rivers and seas every day, and even fewer reach the eyes of the public (and we do not have, yet, any Google River View) we can fool ourselves into thinking that the status of the rivers and seas barely changes.

Many of the most economically and environmentally significant descriptors of rivers and seas water quality, from fluorescence (to measure phytoplankton and oil) to color to transparency, conductivity, temperature, depth, salinity and optical backscatter (to measure the “impurity” of water) can be monitored in one way or another by sensors from aquatic instruments. So, while big data companies scour the Internet and other online sources to glean insight into consumer behavior and economic production around the world, an almost entirely untapped source of data, rivers and seas data, is waiting to be exploited to improve general welfare.

Data from the rivers and seas

What can you really learn from Data Clippers sensors? Quite a lot of crucial data to companies, scientists, and governments:

Mussel patterns	Crude measurements	Harmful algal blooms	Jellyfish proliferation
Data Clippers can track the number of mussels in ropes to forecast retail performance. Also, a view of the ropes can allow for an estimate of their productivity. Insurance companies can look at damaged property from below to validate claims and flag potential fraud.	After an oil spill, Data Clippers can track the size and movement of oil slicks. Sensors in the Po river will form a network of river assessment and reporting of oil spills buoy arrays, which will provide ample warning to areas in danger of pollution.	The sensor network autonomously modifies its behavior to optimize data collection and interpretation. This adaptive monitoring allows Data Clippers to provide early warning about the rapid growth of algae, which is especially important if they are toxic.	Adaptive sampling can be used so that sensors in adjacent regions may be reactively alerted if necessary, modifying then their behavior. Specifically, if a node detects a proliferation of jellyfish, it modifies its sampling parameters and sends a notification to neighboring nodes.

Wired chose, in their sole judgment and discretion, the 100 more challenging and innovative projects. Together with a jury panel, they are starting a marathon of screening and selection: the best projects will go to the October’s final event in Milan. But only three will get the support of Wired, and its business partners.

Now, we have been contacted and invited to present Data Clippers live in Milan.

We’ll have three minutes of time to convince the public and jury to vote for Data Clippers…

1000001 Labs

B ºC N

Spain

1000001 Labs’ Hydroino is a prototype of a low-cost, Arduino– and Electric-Imp–based buoy for the monitoring of natural-water quality, which environmental-science grad students and do-it-yourself sea enthusiasts can build. Thanks to the real-time component of the monitoring, the participation of the citizens, the development and implementation in existing low-cost prototypes, Hydroino is offering a unique opportunity to monitor noise in relation, for example, to the impact of sounds of oil and gas explorations on belugas, bowhead whales and other sea life such as seashells, and to seismic instability.

The Hydroino idea was inspired by the Citclops European project, in which scientists, looking to encourage undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate interest in sea monitoring, came up with a design for a low-cost buoy that could be built entirely from cheap components or prepackaged kits, and by the LIDO program. The result is a water-resistant box measuring about 13 x 13 x 20 centimeters, just large enough to fit a basic, open-source electronics prototyping platform and communications payload, and a battery. Sensors, which measure the noise in the water, are connected via cable to the box. The buoy is capable of connecting to a mobile device, so that data gathered in the water can be collected wirelessly.

[www.oceancare.org]

The small size means that Hydroino can be put into the sea using a common deployment system, thus bringing deployment costs down to a bare minimum that make it feasible for a group of dedicated hobbyists in a university lab or even a high school to afford. All told, a Hydroino can be built and deployed for about 300 €, an unheard-of price for getting anything into monitoring the sea.

Bowhead whale [firstworldfacts.com]

The problem

In many marine areas, levels of human-generated noise have doubled every decade for the past 60 years. For marine animals this has been a life-threatening trend. International campaigns to call for the protection of marine animals from oceans, seas and coasts noise pollution are under way. In certain areas of the oceans, seas and coasts, intense sound-waves are been emitted every ten seconds during several months in the search for oil. This noise is a threat to whales, dolphins and other marine life in the area. Governments are ignoring animal, species and environmental conservation issues in their support for oil exploration. A short-sighted rush to explore oil and gas resources in the oceans, seas and coasts will not only cause harm to marine life, but jeopardizes the development of a sustainable approach, which puts priority on the protection of species and ecosystems, as well as tourism, aquaculture and fisheries.

Sources of oceans, seas and coasts noise pollution are as follows:

• Explosives. They are regularly detonated in the ocean by military forces, scientists, and the oil and gas industries, for demolition purposes, seismic exploration or tests to determine the shock resistance of ships. Explosions create extremely powerful noise levels across a wide frequency range and with rapid rise times.
• Shipping traffic. Ships tend to produce low-frequency sound between 10 Hz and 1 kHz that can spread over huge distances. Noise of this frequency interferes with the sounds of whales, dolphins, seals, fishes and other marine animals. More than 90 per cent of the global transportation of goods is made with ships. These vessels are generating an ever-present and constantly rising acoustic “fog” that masks natural sounds and is the most common source of oceans, seas and coasts noise along with seismic air-guns.
• Air-guns. Seismic air-guns are primarily used for oil and gas exploration on the seabed. Air is driven into the water and towards the seabed at high pressure. The sound can penetrate thousands of meters of ocean before heading up to hundreds of kilometers into the earth crust. Up to 20 guns are fired at the same time, with each of them emitting sound every ten seconds, often for 24 hours per day and for several weeks in the same spot. Hydrophones are used to listen and chart the echoes. As easily-extractable resources are depleted, seismic surveys are continually spreading to more sensitive marine habitats and being conducted to ever greater depths.

[www.oceancare.org]

• Military sonar. Active sonar is used by military vessels during exercises and routine deployments to search for objects such as hostile submarines. These mid- and low-frequency sonar systems emit pulses of sound for over 100 seconds at a time for hours. These pulses are emitted with as much energy and in as narrow a range as possible. Low-frequency sonar serves as a way of putting large areas under surveillance and saturates thousands of cubic kilometers of water with sound. Military sonar uses frequencies between 0.1 and 10 kHz and can reach up to 230 decibels. That is equivalent to the sound generated by a space rocket launch.

[www.oceancare.org]

Consequences

Marine animals are dependent on their hearing to navigate, communicate, find a mating partner and catch prey. But sound levels in the oceans are rising constantly. Military sonars used to locate submarines are a particular danger, as their sound waves can be heard within an underwater radius of about 3,000 kilometers. Shipping, offshore oil platforms and the use of air-guns in seismic oil & gas explorations all add to the noise. Oceans, seas and coasts noise pollution leads to marine animals fleeing valuable habitats, never to return. Some are directly induced to flee, while others are compelled to as their prey have left. Oceans, seas and coasts noise pollution has a disruptive impact in mating, finding prey and suckling the young, with some serious consequences in cases when species are already under threat for other reasons.

Additionally, as Natacha Aguilar de Soto et at. suggest, anthropogenic noise causes body malformations and delays development in marine larvae, with potential impact on aquaculture. Understanding the impact of noise on marine fauna at the population level requires knowledge about the vulnerability of different life-stages. Evidence has been provided that noise exposure during larval development produces body malformations in marine invertebrates. Scallop larvae exposed to playbacks of seismic pulses showed significant developmental delays and 50% developed body abnormalities. Similar effects were observed in all independent samples exposed to noise while no malformations were found in the control groups. Malformations appeared in the veliger larval phase, perhaps due to the cumulative exposure attained by this stage or to a greater vulnerability of veliger to sound-mediated physiological or mechanical stress. Such strong impacts suggest that abnormalities and growth delays may also result from lower sound levels or discrete exposures, increasing the potential for routinely-occurring anthropogenic noise sources to affect recruitment of wild scallop larvae in natural stocks.

Participatory monitoring as part of the solution

Our vision is one in which citizens take an active role in the monitoring of activities causing noise pollution. Information streaming in from citizen-deployed sensors in near real-time may permit adaptive decision-making to maximize the effectiveness of environmental-protection programs around the world.  Also helped by the ubiquity of cell-phones, the promise of sensor networks presents a tremendous opportunity to leapfrog traditional methods of gathering important information and empowering individuals. We claim that citizens take a participatory and responsible approach to oceans, seas and coasts habitats. For this reason we have developed a three-step participatory blueprint on oceans, seas and coasts noise pollution:

1. Oceans, seas and coasts noise pollution should be recognized as a serious problem by the citizens and it should be tackled.
2. To reduce and regulate oceans, seas and coasts noise pollution, citizens should ask for the application of the precautionary principle, the development of effective guidelines and binding regulations on noise reduction, as well as the creation of biosphere reservations, UNESCO World Heritage Marine Zones and other protected areas.
3. An international threshold on ocean noise must be established and noise levels in the oceans should be monitored with the participation of citizens, with their environmental impact studied by scientists.

 [http://thingful.net/]

Hydroino as part of the revolution in Making

Hydroino is part of the revolution in Making, fueled by recent cultural and technological advances. 3D printers, modular electronics, and online libraries of open-source designs empowered us to bring our ideas to life with groundbreaking speed and creativity. Community hackerspaces (and Fab Labs and maker spaces) have opened their doors to us. Cooperation in manufacturing accelerated the innovation pipeline from invention to market.

As Eric King says, Makers are a powerful force of innovation and entrepreneurship across the world. And beyond the impressive promise of revitalizing hardware manufacturing, the Maker movement offers a truly unprecedented resource: global creation. Great ideas can come from anywhere. How many times in human history must inspiration have struck those who lacked the means to create a prototype? How many of our great ideas have gone unrealized? By democratizing the means to create, the Maker movement is poised to unlock humanity’s power of invention. Sensor technology is an integral part of the Maker movement. Our sensors monitor the quality of the water – they’ll send an alert to your phone when the noise in the water surpasses a certain threshold. Information about our physical world is increasingly detected, analyzed, and returned to us as useful insights that can improve our lives. And, because the sensors transmit this information over the Internet, we talk about “Internet of Things”, in which, however, there is a vast hole: much of the developing world is a sensors desert. Here, ironically, the world’s most vulnerable people stand to gain the most from improved access to critical information on essential issues like water quality.

Recognizing this potential, USAID challenged Makers around the world to create sensor technologies that can improve the lives and livelihoods of the world’s most vulnerable people. The U.S. Global Development Lab has launched a “Sensors for Global Development” Fab Award in partnership with the World Bank, Intel Corporation, and the Fab Foundation.

Useful information streaming in from sensors in near real-time may permit adaptive decision-making to maximize the effectiveness of aid programs around the world.  Also helped by the ubiquity of cell-phones, the promise of sensor networks presents a tremendous opportunity to leapfrog traditional methods of gathering important information and empowering individuals.

The Sensors for Global Development Fab Award challenged the Maker movement to get involved. USAID called for Makers to focus their efforts on creating low-cost sensor technologies that promise to help improve the livelihoods of the world’s most vulnerable. This pervasive group of solvers take on society’s most fundamental challenges to achieve a more prosperous, resilient, and democratic global community.

The six Fab Award finalists are the following ones:

• Hydroino – a low cost DIY sensor buoy system that empowers students and citizen scientists to monitor the environmental conditions of seas and rivers.
• MoMo (mobile monitor) – a mobile device with a sensor that collects data to track infrastructure and improve accountability in the developing world. WellDone’s water MoMo identifies where village wells are broken and alerts repair teams to fix them.
• Fresh Air in Benin – a network of air quality sensors being developed to monitor urban air pollution in Africa.
• GrowerBot – a smart sensor system for small-scale agriculture that monitors and tracks environmental conditions, providing customized guidance to help growers optimize their productivity.
• Nano Plasmonics Biosensor – a nano-scale optical sensor for identifying organic molecules with a wide range of applications from medical diagnostics to detecting water contamination.
• Safecast – an open source vehicle-mounted sensor network system to empower citizens to collect and publish data, with a focus on mapping radiation levels.

Noise monitoring with Arduino and Electric Imp

As Emily Gertz and Patrick Di Justo note, we usually turn environmental monitoring over to the scientific experts at government agencies, universities, and corporations. They come armed with complicated and expensive equipment as well as specialized educations, and occasionally their own institutional agendas. Since the natural environment is complex, even more so for all the stuff we human beings and our activities have added to the mix, this sort of expertise has an important role in our lives and in our communities. Scientific analysis and expertise are key to creating effective regulations that control the impacts human activities have on the environment and our health. Monitoring the environment for ourselves, however, pulls the curtain back on what all those experts are doing. Understanding brings knowledge, and with knowledge comes the power to make decisions that can change our lives for the better—from holding polluters accountable, to helping scientists study noise pollution.

3D printers, modular electronics, and online libraries of open-source designs empowered us to bring our ideas to life with groundbreaking speed and creativity. Community hackerspaces (and Fab Labs and maker spaces) have opened their doors to us. Cooperation in manufacturing accelerated the innovation pipeline from invention to market. The result is Hydroino, a DIY buoy able to monitor noise in oceans, seas and coasts.

Noise is one of the most pervasive environmental contaminants around. Noise pollution is defined as a sound that is constant, very loud, unwanted, or disturbing to everyday activities in the places living beings live. Underwater sound is made by the movement of water molecules. When an object vibrates, it moves back and forth, creating pressure waves that compress the water first in one direction, and then in the other. These waves of compression travel outward in all directions from the source of the vibration until they hit an obstacle and get absorbed, reflected, or attenuated into nothingness.

When the wave reaches our microphone, its pressure causes a membrane in our microphone to vibrate. As the microphone membrane vibrates, it changes the magnetic field of a magnet behind it. This varying magnetic field causes a very small electric current to flow from the microphone’s wires. That current is what we actually measure with this gadget.

Typically a microphone current is very low—so low that Arduino or Electric Imp would find it difficult to detect much variation in the signal. So we chose a microphone (34.300 CAPSULA ELECTRET 3V, ref. CT116/2) that comes loaded onto a breakout board equipped with an amplifier. This particular amp boosts the signal to one strong enough for Arduino or Electric Imp to detect easily. It required some tweaking of the Arduino and Electric Imp sketch, but it worked. We modified this gadget to listen to oceans, seas and coasts noise, which is complicated, because the microphone needs to be waterproofed, as well as designed to pick up the frequencies used by oil-exploration equipment.

A waterproof housing is essential for Arduino or Electric Imp themselves as well, plus a method to either store the data (on an SD card) for the Arduino or output the data to a device elsewhere for the Electric Imp.

To visually show noise passing different thresholds we created an LED bar display using individual LEDs. The LED bar display is nothing but a collection of light emitting diodes. There is no other circuitry. There aren’t even any built-in resistors to regulate the current. The sketch reflects the actual number of LEDs that we use. One advantage to using individual LEDs is that you can color-code them by intensity. We tried one green LED and two red LEDs to give the readout a sense of urgency. The videos show an LED bar display plugged into a breadboard, along with jumper wires to connect it to Electric Imp.

Make the Hydroino

Parts

1. Arduino MEGA or Electric Imp

2. Arduino Wireless SD shield (if you are going to use Arduino)

3. Breadboard or protoboard

4. Microphone (34.300 CAPSULA ELECTRET 3V, part number CT116/2)

5. 3 LEDs, two or three colors, or LED bar display

6. 22k-ohm resistor

7. 100k-ohm resistor

8. 1k-ohm resistor

9. 220k-ohm resistor

10. TIs LM258 Operational Amplifier (Op Amp)

11. Jumper wires

Breadboard the circuit

Here’s how to build the noise monitor circuit:

• Step 1. Plug the microphone into the breadboard.
• Step 2. Connect a wire between the GND pin of the microphone and the GND pin of Arduino.
• Step 3. Connect the power pin of the microphone to the power pin of Arduino.
• Step 4. Connect the DATA pin of the microphone to the Analog 0 pin of Arduino.
• Step 5. Connect the Digital 2 pin of Arduino to a point on the breadboard.
• Step 6. Connect the LONG or ANODE lead of an LED (or the ANODE lead of an LED bar) to a pin in the same breadboard row as the jumper from D2. Have the LED straddle the breadboard trench, and plug the SHORT lead or CATHODE (or the CATHODE lead of an LED bar) to a pin in the corresponding row on the other side of the breadboard.
• Step 7. Plug a 220-ohm resistor into the breadboard, connecting the cathode row and the GND rail.
• Step 8. Connect a wire from the GND rail to the Arduino GND pin.

Repeat steps 5 through 7 once for every LED you want to use. Increase the digital Arduino pin and breadboard row for each LED, to make a nice row of lights. To keep yourself from going crazy, don’t use the same color wire for each LED, since that makes it unbelievably difficult to spot mistakes made by plugging an LED to the wrong Arduino pin. Alternate colors, or use a whole rainbow of wires.