Testing a citizen science water monitoring approach in Tunisia
(2020) Environmental Science & Policy — Vol. 104, p. 67-72 (2020)
Files
Vanclooster_Fehri_ESP_2020.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 1.78 MB
Details
- Authors
Fehri, Raed 
- Abstract
- Citizen Science (CS) has been emerging in the last decade as a new field of environmental monitoring involving a direct collaboration between everyday citizens and scientists. In Tunisia, several recent governmental efforts aimed at reinforcing and renovating the existing official water monitoring systems. However, the lack of reliable hydrological data is still an issue, which could be better addressed through integrating a CS approach. The latter approach is tested for rainfall monitoring in the Medjerda catchment in Tunisia using cost-effective and publicly available manual rain gauges. We used a step-by-step approach to target, engage and train citizens on using the monitoring tools and transmitting the data to a user-friendly online platform. The ongoing approach involved 7 citizens from different generations and different educational backgrounds. The collected daily CS data are compared with data from reference stations. Results yield a significant correlation between CS data collected at 3 different sites and the reference stations with r (Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC)) ranges between 0.91 and 0.98 for all citizens. Student’s t-test was applied to evaluate the significance of the agreement between the CS and reference data. In addition, the variability of the CS data is compared with the variability associated with the official governmental data. The CS approach delivered consistent outcomes to complement existing Tunisian monitoring systems, and also to enhance innovation, adaptation, and local capacity building in the Tunisian water sector.
- Affiliations
Citations
Fehri, R., Khlifi, S., & Vanclooster, M. (2020). Testing a citizen science water monitoring approach in Tunisia. Environmental Science & Policy, 104, 67-72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2019.11.009 (Original work published 2020)