How to get and keep citizens involved in mobile crowd sensing for water management? A review of key success factors and motivational aspects

Abstract

Citizen science and particularly mobile crowd sourcing (MCS) has large potential in water resources management for data collection and awareness raising. Concerns about data quality, and initiating and sustaining citizen involvement hamper incorporation of citizen science in water monitoring, together with a lack of practical guidance how to set up citizen science monitoring programs. This review presents an overview of key success factors for citizen science including MCS. Specific attention is paid to motivational aspects. Success factors were organized according to project phase and motivations according to selfdetermination theory. The presented overviews provide practical guidelines for setting up citizen science projects. © 2017 The Authors. WIREs Water published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. How to cite this article:WIREs Water 2017, 4:e1218. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1218 INTRODUCTIONC limate change, population growth, and economic development are major challenges for water resources management. For example, for the Netherlands rising of sea level, higher river discharges, more prolonged periods of droughts, and increasing water quality challenges are foreseen. 1 Salinization, acidification, eutrophication, and habitat fragmentation will further increase the pressure on ecosystem and environment. 1 It is expected that innovations in water monitoring are needed to generate knowledge to address the challenges and develop effective water resource management. 2 An additional challenge for water resources management is lack of citizen awareness. Case studies in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom suggest that citizens consider flood protection and water quality management as a task of the authorities and not a community task. 3 In 2014, the OECD 4 warned of 'a striking awareness gap among Dutch citizens related to key water management functions, how they are performed and by whom.' Citizen science can be an attractive instrument to address these challenges, because it offers new monitoring options and can contribute to awareness raising.Citizen science is not a new phenomenon, but revived in the 20th century and gained popularity worldwide over the past two decades. [5][6][7] Many scientific fields adopted citizen science and water resource management is about to join. 2 Involvement of citizens in scientific processes entered a new era in the 20th century with the most well-known citizen science project: the Christmas Bird Count, 6,8 which started in 1900 as a This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.volunteer-based inventory of winter bird populations. Renewed attention for citizen science in the past 20 years has been fuelled by the knowledge-driven society 9 and by changing scientific grant regulations. 6 Easy to use equipment may enhance citizen science in water monitoring, mobile phones increase the se...

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Applying theories for using non-monetary incentives for citizens to participate in crowdsensing projects

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