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www.iiasa.ac.at winter 2017/18 ◼ options 15 the project, the researchers are working with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and community groups in the lower Karnali Basin of Nepal. The remote communities already had hand-drawn paper maps on flood hazard, vulnerability, and capacities, facilitated by NGOs, but there was nothing online—when Liu first visited the region in 2014, he didn’t have any spatial data and couldn’t even find focal communities on online maps. Working with IIASA, Practical Action, the Center for Social Development and Research, and Kathmandu Living Labs (a leading civic tech group in Nepal and South Asia) Liu and colleagues have engaged volunteer citizen mappers and a wide range of stakeholders to map critical flood risk information both online and offline. These maps include geographical information such as rivers, roads, cropland, and forests, as well as features such as housing types, shelters, water pumps, and other spatial information on critical resources for disaster risk management planning. These data are owned and managed by local NGOs and for the first time basin-level flood risk and capacity maps are now available for the area. Other Geo-Wiki projects have reached out to farmers, for example in Brazil and Africa, with mobile apps that allow them to upload data on crops and diseases, and receive alerts related to weather events or disease threats. “We call it participatory citizen science, or even extreme citizen science. It’s not just contributing data, but really co-producing science with people in a community,” says Liu. He points out that the idea of knowledge co-production is not new—researchers in the IIASA Risk and Resilience Program have worked with communities and stakeholders for decades on participatory research that engages stakeholders with many different viewpoints and experiences. Seen from that lens, apps and games in the new citizen science landscape are just one aspect of a broader movement towards the co-creation of science. Citizen science for global sustainability monitoring While questions remain about the quality of crowdsourced data, initial research at IIASA has suggested that citizens can in many cases provide the same quality as experts. The team has experimented with different ways to improve data quality, for example by having multiple people check each point, or by putting greater weight on data from volunteers who have proven to be more reliable. In addition, they have found that people can be trained, and that feedback and engagement help improve quality. “What we are learning is that feedback is key. The more directly citizens are involved in your campaign, the more they understand the campaign and how the data will be used, and the more frequently you check the quality and provide feedback, the better the contributions will be,” Moorthy says. As mobile phones have become ubiquitous even in the poorest areas of the world, the potential for citizens in every part of the planet to engage in citizen science activities is huge, filling data gaps in many fields. Fritz and colleagues also see citizen science as a powerful tool to monitor the 230 indicators that have been identified to track the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. See says, “Citizens can monitor change in a way that scientists and governments just can’t. If you make a map every six years, you will see change, but if you want to monitor the change as it happens, you need far more data than that.” KL Steffen Fritz testing out the new FotoQuest Go app This global field size map is the result of a recent Geo-Wiki campaign. Field size is important information for researchers trying to project food production and food security. no images very large large medium small very small no fields Further info § www.geo-wiki.org § blog.iiasa.ac.at/citizen-science Steffen Fritz fritz@iiasa.ac.at Linda See see@iiasa.ac.at Inian Moorthy moorthy@iiasa.ac.at Wei Liu liuw@iiasa.ac.at