Soda Bottle Science—Citizen Science Monsoon Precipitation Monitoring in Nepal

Davids, Jeffrey C.; Devkota, Nischal; Pandey, Aakash; Prajapati, Rajaram; Ertis, Brandon; Rutten, Martine; Lyon, Steve W.; Bogaard, Thom; Giesen, Nick van de

doi:10.3389/feart.2019.00046

Cited by 28 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…The total investment of high-end, sensor-based water quality monitoring is too high and maintenance costs are often not budgeted. As shown for low-costs rain gauges in a case study in Nepal [9], modern, low-cost sensors combined with a participatory approach could be a very attractive alternative as it showed to be economic and reliable for water quality data collection.…”

Section: Discussion On Water Quality Data Collected By Volunteersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Newly developed mobile phone applications in combination with citizen science are used in different fields of research, such as public health monitoring [2], water resources management [3], environmental monitoring [4][5][6], noise pollution measurement and mapping [7], earth observation [8], precipitation monitoring [9]. Mobile phones are widely used in the water domain [3,10,11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Low-Cost Water Quality Monitoring System for the Ayeyarwady River in Myanmar Using a Participatory Approach

Win

Bogaard

Giesen

2019

Water

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Newly developed mobile phone applications in combination with citizen science are used in different fields of research, such as public health monitoring, environmental monitoring, precipitation monitoring, noise pollution measurement and mapping, earth observation. In this paper, we present a low-cost water quality mobile phone measurement technique combined with sensor and test strips, and reported the weekly-collected data of three years of the Ayeyarwady River system by volunteers at seven locations and compared these results with the measurements collected by the lab technicians. We assessed the quality of the collected data and their reliability based on several indicators, such as data accuracy, consistency, and completeness. In this study, six local governmental staffs and one middle school teacher collected baseline water quality data with high temporal and spatial resolution. The quality of the data collected by volunteers was comparable to the data of the experienced lab technicians for sensor-based measurement of electrical conductivity and transparency. However, the lower accuracy (higher uncertainty range) of the indicator strips made them less useful in the Ayeyarwady with its relatively small water quality variations. We showed that participatory water quality monitoring in Myanmar can be a serious alternative for a more classical water sampling and lab analysis-based monitoring network, particularly as it results in much higher spatial and temporal resolution of water quality information against the very modest investment and running costs. This approach can help solving the invisible water crisis of unknown water quality (changes) in river and lake systems all over the world.

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Section: Discussion On Water Quality Data Collected By Volunteersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Low-Cost Water Quality Monitoring System for the Ayeyarwady River in Myanmar Using a Participatory Approach

Win

Bogaard

Giesen

2019

Water

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“…Data availability about natural and managed water resources were seen as a central limitation to education across the LAC region in the Watermas project. This is not necessarily a new observation as data limitations are a known problem for water resource management globally (e.g., [44,45]). What we have seen in our efforts for education development for Ecuador and Cuba is a lack of clear examples of relevant water resource management case studies as a major hinderance.…”

Section: Increasing Access To Water Data and Pedagogic Information Acmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Water Management Education across the Latin America and Caribbean Region

Lyon

Goethals

Schneider

et al. 2019

Water

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Education can help secure inclusive and resilient development around water resources. However, it is difficult to provide the latest science to those managing water resources (both now and in the future). Collectively, we hypothesize that dissemination and promotion of scientific knowledge using students as central agents to transfer theoretical knowledge into practice is an efficient way to address this difficulty. In this study, we test this hypothesis in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region as a representative case study region. First, we use a literature review to map a potential gap in research on education around water resources across the LAC region. We then review potential best practices to address this gap and to better translate water resources education techniques into the LAC region. Integral to these efforts is adopting students as agents for information transfer to help bridge the gap between the global state-of-the science and local water resources management. Our results highlight the need to establish a new standard of higher educational promoting exchange between countries as local populations are vulnerable to future shifts in climate at global scales and changes in land usage at regional scales. The new standard should include peer-to-peer mentoring achieved by jointly exchanging and training students and practitioners in water management techniques, increasing access to water data and pedagogic information across the region, and lowering administration roadblocks that prevent student exchange.

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“…Citizen science based data collection can be a cost-effective method, while also raising public awareness on the topic (Rambonnet et al, 2019). Recent examples of crowd-based measurements include characterization of urban rainfall (Vos et al, 2017), monsoon rainfall (Davids et al, 2019), soil-plant-atmosphere interactions (Fischer et al, 2019), and stream level measurements (Lowry et al, 2019;Seibert et al, 2019). For data collection on land-based litter, the Litterati mobile phone app is often used (Litterati, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowd-Based Observations of Riverine Macroplastic Pollution

et al. 2020

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Macroplastic pollution (> 0.5 cm) negatively impacts aquatic life and threatens human livelihood on land, in oceans and river systems. Reliable information on the origin, fate and pathways of plastic in river systems is required to optimize prevention, mitigation and reduction strategies. Yet, accurate and long-term data on plastic transport are still lacking. Current macroplastic monitoring strategies involve labor intensive sampling methods, require investment in infrastructure, and are therefore infrequent. Crowd-based observations of riverine macroplastic pollution may potentially provide frequent cost-effective data collection over a large geographical range. We extended the CrowdWater citizen science app for hydrological observations with a module for observations of plastic in rivers. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of crowd-based observations of floating macroplastic and macroplastic on riverbanks. We analyzed data from two case studies: (1) floating plastic measured in the Klang (Malaysia), and (2) plastic on riverbanks along the Rhine (the Netherlands). Crowd-based observations of floating plastic in the Klang yield similar estimates of plastic transport (2,000-3,000 items h −1), cross-sectional distribution (3-7 percent point difference) and polymer categories (0-6 percent point difference) as reference observations. It also highlighted the high temporal variation in riverine plastic transport. The riverbank observations provided the first data of macroplastic pollution on the most downstream stretch of the Rhine, revealing peaks close to urban areas and an increasing plastic density toward the river mouth. The mean riverbank density estimates are also similar for the crowd-based and reference methods (573-1,033 items km −1). These results highlight the value of including crowd-based riverine macroplastic observations in future monitoring strategies. Crowd-based observations may provide reliable estimations of plastic transport, density, spatiotemporal variation and composition for a larger number of locations than conventional methods.

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Soda Bottle Science—Citizen Science Monsoon Precipitation Monitoring in Nepal

Cited by 28 publications

References 37 publications

A Low-Cost Water Quality Monitoring System for the Ayeyarwady River in Myanmar Using a Participatory Approach

A Low-Cost Water Quality Monitoring System for the Ayeyarwady River in Myanmar Using a Participatory Approach

Improving Water Management Education across the Latin America and Caribbean Region

Crowd-Based Observations of Riverine Macroplastic Pollution

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