Citizen Science in the Upper Blue Nile Basin: Capturing the Hydrological Cycle and Catalyzing Community Participation
Abstract
Unpredictable rainfall in the Upper Blue Nile Basin contributes to food and water insecurity which often leads to economic loss for famers, making agricultural development challenging. To address some of these challenges, a multi-year collaborative endeavor between USA, European and Ethiopian Institutions was established by way of a NSF funded PIRE project, which seeks to understand how the relationships between scientists, farmers and water managers influence the production, dissemination, and outcome of new scientific knowledge. As part of this objective, a Citizen Science Initiative (CSI) began in 2017 with the aim to facilitate the development of the forecast, alleviate data scarcity challenges and catalyze local community engagement. This initiative is working to establish that high schoolers, farmers and scientists both locally and internationally co-create usable, quality data sets in data-scarce regions.
Four communities in the Amhara region of Ethiopia were selected by social scientists participating in the project. Both male and female high school students and male farmers from these communities serve as citizen scientists, collecting soil moisture, river stage and groundwater level data. These datasets are transmitted via an e-Ping App developed specifically for use by the students and farmers with the capability to upload both text and data. In addition to these activities, the students are engaged with professors and graduate students at Bahir Dar University where they will be learning to synthesize and communicate the data they have collected and are participating in longitudinal studies to evaluate if participation has encouraged further involvement with the STEM field. This international collaboration requires extensive planning and communication not only to train the citizen scientists and collect the data, but also to process the data after the fact. Currently, the data sets are being used by researchers to calibrate models and to validate the forecast. In addition to creating protocols for validating the quality of the citizen science data, recommendations for best practices for citizen science projects in data-scarce regions emerged and are presented here.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMSY0110002R
- Keywords:
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- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 4327 Resilience;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 4343 Preparedness and planning;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES