Welcome to the course, and an outline of the learning objectives

In part one, we dived right into the subject of citizen science, and looked at some of the citizen observatories which make-up WeObserve. We heard lots of stories from different projects and considered best practice for citizen scientists.

We also discussed community building and team formation. We talked about the different ways citizens can come together and look at environmental issues in groups. And how to use these issues as a starting point in creating a citizen observatory. 

In part two, we will be focusing on data. We will discover the importance of data in citizen science, and find out what to consider when collecting data. The observatories will share their approaches to collecting data. We’ll also hear about low-cost and do-it-yourself sensors that you can use to collect your own data. 

We’ll apply these approaches to the activity in this part by thinking about the types of measurements we can collect, and learn to create a simple plan for action.

Action spotlight: land use and land cover

In this video, you heard from Inian at IIASA who spoke about how some of the WeObserve citizen observatories are monitoring land use and land cover.

Land cover refers to the type of surface that covers an area of land, for example: vegetation, water bodies or urban areas. Land use is how we describe the current function of an area of land, which could have an agricultural, recreation or residential function, for example. 

Inian told us about how LandSense combines satellite data with citizen science, using the information collected by people on the ground to verify satellite imagery with Natura Alert. We’ll hear more about this project in a forthcoming spotlight step. 

We also heard about the GROW Observatory and how this project used sensors to monitor land use through soil moisture, using specific approaches to capture the right information.