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Short Abstract

This work focuses on upscaling RiverWatch: a citizen science initiative to monitor pollution in the Sarno River, Italy to four demo sites in the Philippines where citizen scientists were engaged in three phases covering co-creation, co-design, and co-development in river plastic monitoring.

Abstract

The growing interest in incorporating citizen science into various research domains and decision-support tools provides a huge opportunity to integrate natural and social sciences and generate a greater societal impact. Citizen-led initiatives related to global issues such as environmental monitoring are increasing, especially when the citizen scientists are also direct stakeholders (e.g., in water quality). However, scientific confidence in these projects where data are collected, generated, or analyzed by citizen scientists still remains low. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a citizen science research framework that incorporates diverse geographic contexts to reveal various sources of knowledge and confidence gaps.

In this study, we enriched the RiverWatch initiative by introducing it to four demonstration sites in the Philippines to promote a global citizen science observatory on river plastic pollution. RiverWatch is a citizen science initiative that was developed to monitor pollution in the Sarno River in Italy utilizing a web app that allows users to collect plastic image data, tag the type of plastic (e.g., plastic bottle), and report simple turbidity levels using their smartphones. Building a rich image database is key to training accurate, and generalizable AI models. We engaged the citizen scientists in three phases: 1) data collection (co-creation), 2) improvement of the RiverWatch web app (co-design), and 3) development of the Philippine Citizen Science Research Framework for river monitoring (co-development). The overarching goal is to empower citizens to support decision-makers in water management, building on previous work and advancements in river water quality monitoring, and citizen science.