The influence of capacity and attitudes in the use of water quality citizen science and volunteer benthic monitoring in the freshwater management activities of Ontario’s Conservation Authorities

The contribution of non-experts to environmental management has been significant and continues to flourish through their participation in citizen science. Despite its growth as an interdisciplinary field of enquiry, there are many gaps in our understanding of the role that citizen science may play in the future of environmental management. In Ontario, Canada, due to funding cuts and infrastructural changes over the past two decades, the provincial government’s ability to monitor changes in freshwater resources had been severely limited. This has resulted in downloading water monitoring to municipalities through their conservation authorities (CAs) which are watershed-based, quasi-governmental water management agencies. The public has been supplementing monitoring efforts through the thousands of hours they have devoted to water quality citizen science, including volunteer benthic monitoring (VBM). Through their watershed-based structure, their mandate to involve community in their work, their activities managing freshwater and their collaborations with various stakeholders, CAs seem like the ideal organizations to connect the public with the decision makers within the municipalities that manage local freshwater resources. However, their use of citizen science, particularly in benthic monitoring, is rare with most of their data being collected in-house by paid expert staff. By conducting 44 interviews among individuals of CAs and citizen science groups, participating in monitoring and collecting documents published by both these groups as well as administering a survey among all of the 36 CAs, I examined the influence of both CA capacity and attitudes in limiting the use of volunteer benthic monitoring by CAs in their freshwater management decisions. Twenty-nine CAs participated in the survey to some extent, although for 24 of these CAs, only one or two questionnaires were submitted (a total of 67 questionnaires completed). While the CA’s capacity through their organizational dynamics (human resources, flexibility, collaborations) generally supports the use of VBM, they lack the financial and human resources to fully support this form of citizen science. This, along with the attitude that volunteers are not capable of collecting credible monitoring information, makes the widespread adoption of VBM by CAs unlikely. Despite these findings, there is still the potential for CAs to successfully adopt certain types of water quality citizen science that are not as financial and human resource intense as VBM, and that have a broader appeal to variety of types of volunteers

Crowdsourced Monitoring, Citizen Empowerment and Data Credibility: The case of Observations.be

peer reviewedaudience: researcher, professional, student, popularizationCrowdsourcing is today a revolutionary phenomenon changing pro- foundly our ways of communicating and producing. This article is interested in two issues that are crucial to its development and impacts. On one hand, it in- vestigates the forms and limits of crowdsourcing-related citizen empowerment. It is less concerned by the now recognized fact that crowdsourcing is empower- ing, but rather focuses on the ways it does so and the architecture of the rela- tions between citizens, scientists and institutions in this new context. On the other, it discusses the question of credibility of data produced through crowd- sourcing. This question represents, in fact, the Achilles’ heel that destabilizes the rise of citizen power in the face of experts and institutions. In its discussion of these two issues, the article relies on a particularly interesting case study: the online platform of participatory monitoring of biodiversity in Belgium Observa- tions.be. The creation of databases is an occasion here for reflexivity, learning and mobilisation. It is also an occasion for the liberation of the lay citizen, as an individual, from the straightjackets delimiting the institutional, scientific and associative spaces where he remains a subject, a collaborator or a member – al- ways in a subordinate position. He becomes a peer producer, partner and discussant. More important, learning and action networks that develop in the platform cut transversally through the three spheres. We find unexpected and new cooperations between citizen, scientists and civil servants. Likewise, ac- tions developed through the platform, mainly reporting, counting campaigns and early alert systems attest new modes of action that transgress the functional and ontological division of the three spheres