NETLAKE Citizen Science

                                                                      'Citizen science: scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, 
                                                                            often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists
                                                                                                                                                            and scientific institutions.”

                                                                                                                                                      - Oxford English Dictionary 2014>

Citizen Science is scientific research performed, partly or fully, by people not professionally trained as scientists is that particular field. It is also known as public participation in scientific research.

Many citizen science projects serve multiple goals as education and outreach, data gathering and addressing scientific literacy. For scientists, citizen science allows for scaling up of their project and informing a wide audience about their work. For citizens, it allows participation in real scientific research, and allows them to learn more about the environment and get hands-on experience together with the scientific process.

Other very popular citizen science projects are for instance Zooniverse (astronomy), Big butterfly count and great Backyard Bird Count, and in the aquatic field Citclops (water colour) and CyanoTracker.

Brno Workshop

In March 2016, ten scientists and ten citizens from eight European countries came together in Brno, in the Czech Republic, with the goal of setting up a NETLAKE citizen science initiative around water quality.

The scientists present work in and with fresh water lakes at various research institutes and universities from all over Europe. Most scientists brought along a citizen who was in some way connected with a local freshwater lake.

These citizens are all interested in water, water quality and ecology: because they liked to fish, dive or swim, or because they taught about water. All citizens were part of a bigger group working in or around local fresh waters, and they thus became ambassadors of water quality for their lake

Topics

Two topics were proposed by scientists to be researched in summer 2016 by the citizen groups:

• Plastics
• Decomposition

The role of the citizens was to decide if these topics were of sufficient interest, and if the protocols to determine both processes were suitable for citizen science. The scientists and the citizens together were responsible for preparing and deploying the relevant protocols (visibility, water colour, decomposition, plastic sampling) and adjusting them along the way.

For 2017 we want to focuss our efforts towards determining the sedimentation rate of natural particles in lakes. How much dead organic (such as dead parts of organisms) or sand and clay particles snow down towards the deeper parts of the lake? This adds to the decomposition in which the organis material is broken down, how much of this material gets transported in to the deep?

Conclusions

The conclusions of the workshop were:

• Both topics, microplastics and decomposition, are very interesting for citizen science!
• Protocols can be made clearer by adding more pictures and having online video

For this last point we are asking everyone to participate. Do you have a nice picture of your home-made Secchi or a movie of how you placed your tea bags? Please send these to us so other people can use them as examples!