SPOTTERON FOUR PREVIEW - A new generation of Citizen Science Apps is on the horizon
The SPOTTERON platform is always extending and together with projects across Europe, Australia, America, and Africa, new features and functionalities are constantly developed. With a new set of major core extensions and the overhaul of important syst...
This was the ECSA Citizen Science Conference 2022 in Berlin
From the 5th to the 8th of October, the ECSA Citizen Science Conference 2022 took place in Berlin under the motto "Citizen Science for Planetary Health."We have been attending this fantastic bi-annual event (for sure) and spent four days in Germany's...
Does Data Validation improve with the community's help in Citizen Science Apps?
The new "Community Data Validation" Feature on the SPOTTERON Platform allows Citizen Scientists to be more deeply involved in the scientific process. The feature update in the ClimateWatch App by Earthwatch Australia allows u...
Spatial Data Recording for Citizen Science Apps
Many Citizen Science and User Engagement projects utilize more than only point data for locations and spatial dimensions. Examples are plentiful - from setting up transects for counting butterflies to recording habitats and transformations. Spatial D...
User Mentions and Push Notifications - Enabling immediate direct communication for all Citizen Science Apps
Imagine a Citizen Scientist asking a question inside your project's App. What if a reply directly reaches the user on the smartphone with a beep as soon it is posted? This next level of immediacy is now a reality with the new "User Mention" feature f...
A Milestone for Citizen Science: SPOTTERON 3.0 is here!
It has been a busy year here at SPOTTERON. Despite the ongoing global pandemic, we are happy that a new platform generation is finally ready for your Citizen Science Apps! After months of building up the groundwork, thorough evaluation, testing and i...
"The Science of Citizen Science" Book has been published!
Starting the new year with some good news: The new open-action book, "The Science of Citizen science "has been finally published by Springer and is now availableas a free book (Open Access) for download.
With over a hundred contributing authors from 24 countries, including us, the book is a culmination of the work of the COST (Cooperation in Science and Technology in Europe) Action, "Citizen Science to promote creativity, scientific literacy, and innovation throughout Europe ", COST Action CA15212.
Live Route Recording in Citizen Science Apps
Every so often, the journey is the reward. When it comes to Citizen Science projects that include data about paths and routes traveled by citizens in the research, recording such geospatial data live is a crucial feature. Projects from areas like environmental health, urban transportation, or social science studies can benefit from being able to en...
Biodiversity in Urban Space - Ars Electronica Festival 2024
Is it strange to live still optimistically and in hope in times of the polycrisis? This question was posed at this year's Ars Electronica Festival in Linz with the theme HOPE. We attended the festival in early September, and in this blog, we'll briefly discuss the workshop "Plant Life on the POSTCITY Roof" led by botanist Friedrich Schwarz. Togethe...
Understanding Climate Crisis Through Citizen Science: The P51 Project in Costa Rica
The climate crisis is undeniably reshaping our world, with its impacts becoming increasingly evident across various aspects of life. From record-breaking temperatures and shifting habitats to declining biodiversity and changes in infrastructure and politics, the effects of climate change are both vast and complex. Many of us can easily perceive war...
AI for Citizen Science Apps - Update on the SPOTTERON AI Image Recognition System for species ID or object identification
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a useful tool for analyzing data and supporting research. While the currently more popular forms of generative AI is impacting our daily lives and society and carries a considerable amount of risks, the intergration of predictive AI in interactive Apps can be highly beneficial for data analysis an...
Collaboration for Effective Sea Action: Release of the EU Marine Citizen Science App COSEA
COSEA is a collaborative, participatory, and community-driven project, funded by the European Union. It focuses on marine environments, marine species, and their habitats, as well as on various innovative approaches to their protection: TRANSEATION and EFFECTIVE are the two science projects that collaborate within COSEA with individual methods and ...
Discover biodiversity — explore biodiversity: The new Citizen Science Game for the Natural History Museum NHM in Vienna, Austria
While we made our preparations for the European Citizen Science Association ECSA conference in Vienna, we had another task on our to-do list: let's make a game for the public day in the museum! But it is not any kind of game, it is the (probably) the largest computer game in Austria! In the Natural History Museum in Vienna, there is the "Deck ...
Citizen Science Dissemination for the IPM Popillia Project
In the last months, the IPM Popillia project, funded by Horizon 2020, has collaborated with SPOTTERON to create informational and dissemination materials about the invasive Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica), which has been spreading across Europe for several years. As part of the IPM Popillia Consortium, SPOTTERON created...
The very first App in the Indigenous Language Trio
Suriname has roughly 14 languages - the official and most spoken language is Dutch. One of Suriname's indigenous languages is Trio, which is spoken by the Tarëno, a conglomeration of analogous subgroups and distinct Amerindian groups (Mirella Nankoe, 2017). The total Tarëno population (Tarëno means "people from here") in Suriname can...
Data Security Layer: Protecting sensitive data in Citizen Science Apps
In many Citizen Science projects, there are distinct data categories which have a sensitive nature. From endangered species to details about personal lives in social science programmes, working with such data elements requires an additional level of protection and security. An integrated feature for better data safety in Citizen Science Together wi...
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SPOTTERON FOUR PREVIEW - A new generation of Citizen Science Apps is on the horizon
The SPOTTERON platform is always extending and together with projects across Europe, Australia, America, and Africa, new features and functionalities are constantly developed. With a new set of major core extensions and the overhaul of important system-related functionalities, the new platform version, SPOTTERON FOUR, brings new innovative tools an...
Citizen Science and iOS 17 - taking care of Citizen Science Apps
As you may have heard, iOS version 17 is on the horizon. A new operating system version introduces new features, polishes existing ones, and carries the torch further. But it also means that the App Store enforces an update of the "base system" on which mobile Apps for iOS are built on, and all existing Apps must be updated to the new software gene...
Designing a Youth Social Citizen Science Handbook for the YouCount Horizon EU 2020 Project
The Horizon Europe 2020 YouCount project recently concluded, summarizing its experiences and findings in a comprehensive Handbook. SPOTTERON has been a steadfast supporter of the Social Citizen Science project, e.g., in designing the YouCount Citizen Science App, the final conference, and now in creating the design for the recently published handbo...
Design process for Citizen Science project AmphiApp (BOKU Vienna)
The AmphiBiom project from BOKU Vienna focuses on comprehensive protection of the green toad and has therefore launched a new amphibian Citizen Science project: AmphiApp. SPOTTERON had the honor of visualizing the project and designing the Citizen Science App AmphiApp, the amphi.at website, the logo and visual ide...
Thank you for all the Citizen Science in 2023!
The year 2023 is slowly coming to an end, but before everyone goes into the well-deserved holidays, here is a quick update about SPOTTERON, new upcoming features, and also a nice season card handcrafted for you. But to start off with the most important thing: thank you very much for bringing so many interesting projects and features to SPOTTERON th...
Conference Design for the YouCount Social Citizen Science Project
The Final Conference for YouCount occurred in Brussels at the start of December. YouCount is a Social Citizen Science project that unites young individuals and stakeholders to collaboratively generate new knowledge and innovations that can contribute to addressing one of the complex societal challenges being faced by Europe: How to increa...
Conference Folder for the Citizen Science Project IPM Popillia
For IPM Popillia, we designed a folder for the Italian Citizen Science Conference in Pisa, which took place last weekend. This folder serves as an introduction to the project for fellow Citizen Science initiatives and individuals potentially interested in becoming Citizen Scientists. It includes key details about the project, insights on ...
Sharing the Soundscapes: Audio Recording in Citizen Science Apps
Besides the visual component of a Citizen Science observation, in some projects, recording audio is as important. From bird songs to amphibian calls, from city noise to dialects - sound recordings offer a distinct form of data in natural science projects, in linguistic citizen science, or even in capturing reports about environmental quality. ...
New ways of Science Communication: Ars Electronica Festival 2023
The European Space Agency and its new way of communicating with the public The climate crisis was one of the thematic focal points at the Ars Electronica Festival 2023, which took place in early September. The European Space Agency, whose observational data provides the basis for national and international efforts to predict future changes in clima...
Citizen Science at the Ars Electronica Festival 2023 - the European Union Prize for Citizen Science
Last weekend marked a historic moment for Citizen Science in Europe. The first-ever European Union Prize for Citizen Science was awarded on Thursday, Sept. 7, 2023 at this year's Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. The theme of the event was "Who owns the truth?" - a question that is particularly relevant for Citizen Science. We were on-site and...
Automated Reports from Citizen Science Apps about occuring observations
Sensitive topics like invasive alien species can lead to challenges when utilizing Citizen Science and public involvement. Observations can be time-sensitive, like disaster reports, or topic-sensitive, like controlled pests in agricultural monitoring. Some data categories even include legal requirements, like in the latter example, where new sighti...
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