Khim Cathleen Saddi 1, Gaia Proietti 2, Kacper Malec 3, and Salvatore Manfreda 1
1 Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Edile e Ambientale (DICEA), Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy;
2 UNESCO Chair in Water Resources Management and Culture, University for Foreigners of Perugia, Perugia, Italy;
3 Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Gdańsk University of Technology, Gdańsk, Poland.
Citizen-led initiatives tackling global challenges such as environmental monitoring are growing in recent years, especially when the citizen scientists are also direct stakeholders (e.g., in water quality). Currently, the confidence of the scientific community in these projects where data are collected, generated, or analyzed by citizen scientists still remains low. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a citizen science research framework to elevate scientific merit of citizen science research by the citizen for the citizen.
In this work, we expanded and enriched the RiverWatch initiative by co-designing, and co-creating knowledge with three partner communities in their local rivers, while also promoting a global citizen science observatory in river plastic pollution. RiverWatch is a citizen science initiative that was developed to create a virtual observatory to monitor pollution in the Sarno River in Italy. A web app has been developed that allows users to collect image data of plastic debris flowing in rivers, tag the type of plastic (e.g., plastic bottle, bags, etc.), and report simple turbidity levels using their smartphones. Building a rich image database was key to training accurate, generalizable AI models for plastic detection and enhancing their accuracy and generalizability across diverse environmental contexts. We engaged the citizen scientists in three phases: 1) data collection using the RiverWatch web app (co-creation), 2) technical and design improvement of the RiverWatch web app (co-design), and 3) development of the Riverwatch Citizen Science Data Quality Framework for river monitoring (co-development). The overarching goal is to increase scientific merit of citizen science projects and empower citizens to support decision-makers in water management, building on previous work and advancements in river water quality monitoring and citizen science of RiverWatch project.
Keywords: Citizen Science, plastic pollution, AI models, CS quality