CSWG activities

Summer is here and it is the peak time to get involved in environmental citizen science (although, of course, many projects do have participation all year round, such as weather monitoring or assessing river quality). Understanding the breadth of citizen science supported by UK government agencies and bodies remains a challenge, and it is why the CSWG is working on a standard questionnaire used by agencies and other bodies to consistently evaluate their citizen science.

Many agencies in England are working together through the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment programme. Natural England are developing frameworks – the first for urban, and subsequently for other environments - to help local stakeholders understand how citizen science can support assessment of natural capital. JNCC are drawing together a resource library of methods and tools (initial version available) to support locally relevant, and nationally rigorous monitoring, and pilot projects are underway in Wessex, Northumbria and a tributary of the River Severn to explore different scales of stakeholder networking and collaboration.

Natural Resources Wales (NRW), like many agencies, receive many requests to support citizen science projects. They have developed an innovative screening tool to help applicants demonstrate how they have taken best practice into account (drawing on UKEOF resources, amongst others) when requesting support from NRW.

Across the CSWG, it is felt that there is a priority to demonstrate the value of citizen science to senior decision-makers. As well providing ‘hard evidence’ of how policy depends on citizen science data, the Better Biodiversity Data project in Scotland is creating an exhibition at Holyrood in September 2024 about the life cycle of citizen science data – from collection to impact – and we are looking forward to this communication about the incredible value of citizen science.

What is citizen science for? There are many ways of answering the question. At our UKEOF Citizen Science Working Group in November 2023, we reflected on this with a talk from Michael Strähle and Christine Urban from Wissenschaftsladen Wien (Science Shop Vienna) about the CS Track project. This recently-finished project was funded by the EU to enlarge our knowledge about the benefits, barriers, enablers and disincentives of citizen science. They found that often citizen science is promoted with high aspirations: to increase democratisation and societal inclusiveness, but the aims of citizen science activities are varied and need to be evaluated accordingly. They found that many projects are evaluated (which is a good thing), but there is a lack of systemic and external evaluation across the field of practice, and they concluded that there needed to be greater investment in ethical consideration. Details of the outputs across the project are available at https://cstrack.eu/. The conversation continued about the importance of ethics across citizen science, including the use of language. In the CSWG we recognised the limitations of the term ‘citizen science’ – it often doesn’t feel sufficiently inclusive, but the term also has a momentum (including in government agencies) which shouldn’t be given up lightly.

Moving on from ‘what is citizen science for?’, to ‘what is citizen science worth?’, the topic of valuing participation in citizen science is a big one that several UKEOF partners are grappling with. It is certainly not easy to put a monetary value on the benefit of participation in citizen science, but doing this helps to provide quantitative evidence of ‘return on investment’ for funders. Sharing expertise across the network will help us explore these ideas together.

For our September 2023 meeting, the Citizen Science Working Group had a couple of guest speakers. First, Simon Browning from the Rivers Trust introduced us to the Catchment Systems Thinking Cooperative (CaSTCo) project. CaSTCo is creating a radical step change in citizen and community science for evidence-based decision-making in our river catchments. It runs over 3 years, involves 27 partner organisations and is led by the Rivers Trust and United Utilities. The project has been developing a charter for citizen science, a list of accredited methods for citizen science water quality monitoring, protocols for data sharing by local partners and setting up 10 demonstration catchments. A collaborate monitoring plan is being produced for each of these catchments, and each being supported by a volunteer co-ordinator. One of the exciting opportunities is the way that investment in this project is bringing together several other aligned projects, so adding even more value to the investment. The vision is to scale this up across the country and plan for its financial sustainability.

We were also joined by Matthew Fry from the Met Office who gave a presentation on the benefits and challenges of using crowdsourced data to improve weather predictions.  Crowdsourced air temperature data for Manchester for 2020 indicated that existing Met Office weather stations around the edges of the city may underestimate maximum temperatures in the central urban area during hot weather.  The crowdsourced data was combined with data from the existing Met Office stations to generate gridded data sets that more accurately reflect the true heat island effect of urban areas. They will continue to update these models and upscale these results to other cities, so demonstrating the value of citizen science in providing data at high spatial resolution.

The CSWG is organising a symposium on ‘Inclusivity in Citizen Science’, to be held on Wednesday 29th November 2023 from 10am-1pm. Six speakers have been confirmed so far. Please register and pass on the information.

Increasingly UKEOF member organisations are developing more strategic approaches towards citizen science. This has been a welcome shift over the past 2-3 years, compared to the more ad hoc support for citizen science within some of these organisations in the past. One of the benefits of the UKEOF, and in particular the Citizen Science Working Group, is the opportunity to gain feedback on these strategic approaches.

In the Citizen Science Working Group meeting in May, we spent time hearing about and reflecting on the strategic approach developed by Natural England for ‘community science’ in the Natural Capital Ecosystem Assessment. (For this work, they prefer the term ‘community’ rather than ‘citizen’ science.) They will be focussing on piloting ‘regional hubs’ to bring a more collaborative, local focus to citizen science, and they will be developing ‘survey frameworks’ to develop standards, tools and consistent methodologies to support the ‘local’ activities in the regional hubs. There is still much detail to be worked out, but importantly this pilot will be subject to thorough evaluation, so that lessons can be learned and shared. We hope that this will be for the benefit of organisations across the UK.

Of course, citizen science has a distinctive flavour in different countries and different agencies, but often the challenges we have are shared. The CSWG is currently planning for an open symposium on ‘inclusivity’. We are concerned about the importance of inclusivity for its own sake – there is a moral imperative for our volunteer-based monitoring to be inclusive to all, but we think it also has an impact on the quality of our monitoring, and the trust relationships of people towards agencies and environmental evidence. Watch out for further details, but it is preliminarily planned for 29th November. Another challenge that several organisations are facing is how to sustainably maintain data infrastructures and tools (especially smartphone apps). The benefit of the UKEOF CSWG is that these shared challenges can be explored together.