Last Friday the 5th of April, OTTERS held a successful workshop at the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) 2024 conference in Vienna, Austria, on overcoming challenges of standardisation in freshwater and marine citizen science.
The workshop was structured in a way to gather participants’ thoughts and expertise on four main issues: the standardisation of citizen science practices for freshwater investigation (in particular macroinvertebrates, and chemical and optical water quality), and for marine observation (with a focus on jellyfish and litter).
The workshop was moderated by ECSA (Carolina Doran, Joe Jubb, Franziska Stressmann, Leonardo Veronesi). After a brief introduction of the project, our consortium experts presented the issues at stake and led the different sessions detailed above. The speakers were Georgios Sylaios (Democritus University of Thrace), Dori Edelist (University of Haifa), Emily Robertson (University of Haifa), Steven Loiselle (University of Siena/CSGI) and Bruna Gumiero (University of Bologna/CSGI).
The workshop had an enthusiastic turnout, and many common problematics on standardisation, as well as new perspectives from different disciplines were covered. Excellent ideas for solutions and possible collaboration paths were discussed. Thank you very much to our participants!
The findings of the workshop will be integrated into our three whitepapers, currently published in Zenodo:
- The role of citizen science within WFD and SDGs, and how to incentivize the collaboration with environmental regulators
- Riparian Ecotone Citizen Science
- Citizen Science as a contributor to the Marine Strategy Framework Directive implementation
All participants will be sent the full workshop summary (soon also available on the website) and will be invited to contribute as co-authors if they wish to.
Thank you again to our experts and all of the participants, it was an enriching experience with very good discussions, and we look forward to the next one!
