In this episode we learn about CrowdWater, a project where everyone can actively contribute to improve our knowledge about water by supplying data to contribute to forecasts of floods and droughts, for example. This project is hosted at the Universität Zürich and we also take this opportunity to introduce you to the citizen science landscape at our Swiss partner university.
Our Citizen Science podcast series takes you on a tour across our 11 partner universities. Explore a new campus each episode and talk to members of our Una Europa community, to active citizens, volunteers and experts. They tell us more about their involvement with citizen science projects that want to make positive, impactful contributions to their local communities, cities, countries or Europe.
In this third episode we take you to Universität Zürich to meet different experts and citizen scientists. The city of Zürich is host to a wide range of citizen science projects. We get to know the initiative “Citizen Science Zürich” which has Universität Zürich as one of its main partners and acts as a crucial player in connecting academics and citizen scientists. Olivia Höhener tells us about the activities of "Citizen Science Zürich", some of its funded projects, and how they support early-career researchers who want to integrate citizen science approaches into their own research projects.
Our episode also takes a closer look at CrowdWater – an app designed to collect data on rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water in a way that is accessible and easy to use for everyone. We meet three people who have been involved with the CrowdWater research project and its app at different stages in their career, from writing a master’s thesis, researching a PhD project, to being a citizen scientist: Franziska Clerc-Schwarzenbach, Bret Leslie, and Sara Blanco Ramirez will tell us about their engagement with citizen science overall and CrowdWater in particular. They present fascinating insights into how a research project can involve various stakeholders – from individual citizens, groups of school children, to academics and many more – and how these people collect data that can create a noticeable impact on the environment locally and globally. The CrowdWater app is available in 22 languages and you can start contributing today.
This episode of our podcast might be interesting to early-career researchers in particular as our experts tell us about the impact that citizen science approaches can have on PhD projects and how early-career researchers can connect during summer schools and other outreach events.
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