This is a story about my doctoral thesis where I want to explore how gaps in environmental data like temperature or rainfall can be closed by including the public and using additional sources of data like satellites. But why is this data important again? Data is the basis of all things. To use resources like water sustainably, you need to know how much there is. You also need data to predict the weather or grow plants in the right place and time. The traditional way of collecting this data is with automatic stations. In general, there are fewer and fewer because they are expensive and difficult to maintain. The involvement of citizens in data collection research, also called ‘citizen science’, is seen as a promising way to increase data availability at relatively low costs, especially in countries where limited resources for data collection are available. By testing different approaches to engage citizens in data collection in Tanzania, Honduras and Ecuador, HydroCrowd aims to strengthen the acceptance of citizen science as a valid data collection approach.
The HydroCrowd project, of which I’m part of, at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen in Germany looks at how the public can help close these gaps with simple tools. This is called Participatory Monitoring (PM). We built simple measurement stations in remote areas in different tropical countries. The stations have a wooden board, information, and cheap instruments to measure data. There are two types of stations: weather and water. At weather stations, people can measure temperature, rainfall, and humidity. At water stations, they can measure river levels and river turbidity.
It’s simple: With the HydroCrowd app, you can immediately check the weather and water conditions at the different stations in the project regions based on photos and measurements submitted by other citizen scientists. You can also check out the HydroCrowd stations and submit measurements through the web application https://www.spotteron.com/hydrocrowd/. If there’s no internet, measurements can be uploaded later.
https://interface.hydrocrowd.de/ allows you to choose a station and view and download the Participatory Monitoring (PM) data. We installed sensors at some stations to check the quality of the PM data against professional measurements. The quality of the PM data is monitored and updated regularly. From June 2023 to June 2024, e.g. air temperature is good, but rainfall needs improvement. I’m checking if other data can be combined with PM data to match climate station quality. Here satellite data comes into play, because there are different satellites which can measure e.g. temperature or rainfall on daily basis.
In September 2024, I will be a guest doctoral student with Thomas Dowling at the University of Auckland to expand my knowledge in this field. I expect this stay to be very helpful for my thesis. In return I will help at the university and offer my expertise where I can. I also want to learn how Māori are considered in New Zealand’s science so I can improve the consideration of Indigenous People in our project.
