Citizen Science for Water Quality Monitoring Applying Foss

Abstract

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Citizen science is an efficient tool for data collection for scientific projects. In the framework of SIMILE Interreg Italy-Switzerland project, the citizen’s contribution to monitor the quality of lakes water has been envisaged. In the initial phase of this research, state of art of citizen science and water quality monitoring was investigated. The analysis of past and current projects, governed by different organizations and communities, pointed out a variety of tasks that can be accomplished by citizens. In these studies, authors stressed suitability of smartphones for the fulfilment of various assignments given to citizens. Due to that, in this research, different smartphone applications for water quality monitoring were tested and analyzed. Despite the fact that many applications for water quality monitoring are freely available, none of them is open source. Hence, this paper is proposing the design of a new application, for the purposes of SIMILE project, that will be free and open source, addressing not just users but also developers giving them a possibility for customization and improvement.</p>

Citizen Science Tools for Lake Monitoring in the Framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: The Project SIMILE

“…As for the mobile application, a detailed analysis of similar tools is described in a paper from Jovanovic et al (2019). The authors presented six different applications used for water quality monitoring with a citizen science approach.…”

“…Even though most applications are free, none of them is open source. For this reason, a new mobile application has been designed according to the following criteria: it should provide user support, it has to be user-friendly, able to work offline, free, and open source (Jovanovic et al, 2019).…”

“…Although the above-mentioned systems have not been developed specifically for lake monitoring, there were some similarities with the tool created for SIMILE. The latter consists of a client-side with both the mobile and Web applications; and a server side with servers used to host, install, and execute the applications, the database, and a workstation processing collected images (Jovanovic et al, 2019). In the following section the system's functionalities will be introduced.…”

Crowdsourcing Water Quality With the Simile App

“…The current state of the art in this field has been explored in order to find any existing solution that could satisfy SIMILE project requirements regarding citizen science. Such investigation has been conducted taking into account both applications specifically related to lake and water quality assessment (Jovanovic et al, 2019) and products generically built for data collection. Figure 1.…”

“…Three of the applications presented so far are free, while HydroColor has a cost of 3.5 €, all four are not open source. A more detailed review of these and other mobile applications for water quality monitoring can be found in Jovanovic et al (2019). In addition to applications specifically devoted to water quality monitoring, also applications designed for generic infield data collection have been explored.…”