Recently, there has been a recognition that citizen scientists can play an integral role in better observation and understanding of environmental systems. Participation in citizen science programs can spark community awareness regarding environmental issues and empower greater participation in environmental decision making. Our goal is to build a national citizen science water quality data collection network that can monitor water quality contamination across geographic scales that would be too large to be efficiently sampled using traditional methods. To achieve this, we first must evaluate the quality of citizen scientist generated water quality data. We evaluated the capacity for citizen scientists to collect repeatable and quantitative water quality data on nutrients, turbidity and atrazine. We classified citizen scientists into three groups, expert, experienced and naïve, based on their prior experience with laboratory water quality data collection. Water quality data collected by each of these three citizen scientist groups was evaluated for accuracy, repeatability and reproducibility. This type of information is critical to evaluate the useability of citizen scientist generated water quality information for environmental decision making and environmental research.

Citizen science as a quantitative tool for temporal and spatial water quality assessment

256th National Meeting (2018)

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