citizen involvement

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Scent Scientists Develop a New Game to Enable Citizens Monitor the Environment

Scientists across Europe have developed a new augmented reality game called ‘Scent Explore’ to enable and encourage citizens to monitor their local environments
It’s one of four new Apps developed by the Scent Project to improve the accuracy of existing flood risk maps by more than 15%
Scent is a European Union research project funded under the Horizon 2020 programme

Scientists across Europe have developed a new augmented reality game to enable and encourage citizens to monitor their local environments. Read more →

Scent mid-term review meeting in Brussels

Looking back, looking ahead

On Thursday 17^th May 2018 the Scent consortium, the European Commission Project Officer and the external reviewer gathered for the project’s mid-term review meeting in the heart of the EU. The Scent project team presented the work conducted in the first 18 months and outlined the next steps and plans for future activities. Read more →

Scent at Nordic Game 2018

May 29, 2018/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda Henriksson

Scent partner XTeam Software Solutions srls took part in the annual Nordic Game conference held in Malmö, Sweden on 23-25 May 2018. Nordic Game is a leading game conference in Europe and serves as a venue for developers, publishers, and financial backers to meet, network and catch up on the latest news in the world of gaming. This year, Nordic Game hosted over 2,000 professionals in the field. Read more →

WeObserve launches its first Communities of Practice

May 4, 2018/0 Comments/in News, Related News /by Linda Henriksson

Are you interested in citizen science and citizens’ observatories? Join a WeObserve Community of Practice!

The WeObserve project will launch its first three Communities of Practice at the Citizen Science Workshop Day of the 2nd International ECSA Conference at the University of Geneva on 6^th June 2018.

Read more and register for the CoP launch workshop here: https://www.weobserve.eu/launch-weobserve-communities-practice/

Scent Spotlight series – Kinga Cîmpan, Romanian Ornithological Society

May 2, 2018/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda Henriksson

In today’s Spotlight feature we are pleased to introduce the Romanian Ornithological Society (SOR) and Kinga Cîmpan, Ecologist at SOR.

SOR is an independent non-governmental organisation founded in 1990. It is Romania’s largest wildlife conservation charity aiming to conserve and study wild bird species, their habitats and sites in Romania. SOR strives to increase people’s awareness of environmental sustainability and works for the protection of biodiversity and bird fauna. As the Romanian partner of BirdLife International, SOR carries out its policy and strategy with a joint global target: conservation of birds and their habitats. Read more →

Meet the Scent Explore gaming characters!

April 30, 2018/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda Henriksson

Our partners from XTeam are making good progress on the development of the Scent Explore gaming app. The app will be launched this summer, and you can already have a sneak peek at the game by checking out the cute animal characters:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIsYktdt5p8RJUwCMA_ESFg

Scent Spotlight series – Athanasios Chaldeakis, Region of Attica

March 14, 2018/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda Henriksson

In today’s Spotlight feature, we are proud to present Scent partner Region of Attica and Athanasios Chaldeakis, Project Manager of Scent on behalf of Region of Attica.

Region of Attica is the regional authority governing the wider area of the Athens metropolis. Read more →

Scent Spotlight series – Harris Georgiou, Hellenic Rescue Team of Attica

January 4, 2018/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda Henriksson

We recently spoke to Harris Georgiou, volunteer with the Hellenic Rescue Team of Attica (HRTA).

HRTA is an independent non-profit organisation, a union of citizens and a community centre consisting entirely of volunteers who offer their time, expertise, knowledge and personal effort to assist fellow citizens in cases of emergency. Read more →

Scent at SCI:COM 2017 in Dublin

December 8, 2017/0 Comments/in News, Project News /by Linda Henriksson

Scent participated in SCI:COM, the largest science communication event in Ireland, on Thursday 7^th December 2017.

This year, the focus of SCI:COM was on involvement and collaboration in research. The conference offered a full day of thought-provoking discussions and talks by inspirational speakers on engaging topics. Key questions included how to successfully work with the public, how to get new people on board and how to widen the engagement with communities we don’t currently reach. As Scent is all about involving citizens in science, SCI:COM was highly relevant to the project and offered new insights into citizen engagement strategies. Read more →

Science for the people, by the people

December 8, 2017/0 Comments/in News, Related News /by Linda Henriksson

Scientists need the help of citizens in carrying out important research

In his Irish Times article of 7^th December 2017, John Roche describes the power citizens have to contribute to advances in scientific knowledge and to democratise research. Roche, an Astrophysicist and Assistant Professor in Science Education at Trinity College Dublin, describes a new citizen science initiative between the Irish daily newspaper The Irish Times and citizen science researchers across Ireland. Read more →

Scent Toolbox

September 24, 2019/by Linda Henriksson

What is the Scent Toolbox?

The Scent Toolbox is a set of smart technologies designed to engage citizens in environmental monitoring.

Why use the Scent Toolbox?

With the Scent Toolbox, you can use citizen science to collect up-to-date information about changes in the environmental, such as changes in land-cover/land-use, river parameters and soil conditions. All of this information is analysed by the Toolbox and used to help scientists and policymakers to create more accurate flood maps for the prevention of floods and other natural disasters.

Who is it for?

Anybody can use the Scent Toolbox. Public authorities can use the Toolbox to crowdsource information to make more informed policy-decisions concerning flood management and prevention. Communities and environmental groups can use the Toolbox to monitor changes in their local environment. Individuals can use the Scent Toolbox apps to have fun while also helping to protect the environment.

How does it work?

Scent Toolbox – Applications

Explore your surroundings with Scent Explore!

Scent Explore is an augmented reality game developed for the Scent project by XTeam Software Solutions.Learn more

Scent Explore invites you to discover your environment in an exciting way. Little Scent Explore characters are hiding in interesting places around you, and you collect points when you find them! Your smartphone or tablet will give an audio alert when you are approaching a character. To earn points, just tap on the screen to capture a character when you see it. Your camera will take a photo of the location and upload it to Scent. Compete with your friends and family and see who wins!

By playing Scent Explore, you make a valuable contribution to citizen science. You help researchers understand changes in the environment because all the locations in which you catch Scent characters contain interesting information that researchers will use to analyse and map the environment.

Join the Scent movement and become a citizen scientist today!

Scent Collaborate

Scent Collaborate is a browsing-based crowdsourcing platform developed by XTeam for the Scent project.Learn more

Scent Collaborate allows users to train and improve the Scent automated tools simply by browsing existing images and labelling them. Teaching the tools to identify pastures, forests, river banks, buildings, paved areas etc. will allow for more accurate mapping of the environment, which in turn will help predict and prevent flooding and other natural disasters.

You can access Scent Collaborate here:
https://scent-project.eu/scent-collaborate

The validation of the labels is supported by the Scent Captcha plugin that is embedded in the Scent Collaborate application. Scent Captcha plugin is distributed as an open source component, and can be embedded in third-party websites. The source code is available here

Scent Measure

Scent Measure is an innovative application developed by ICCS for the Scent project to measure changes in soil conditions. Learn more

The app uses portable sensors to measure and report the soil moisture and air temperature to your smartphone or tablet.

Scent Measure is easy to use – simply insert the portable sensor into the soil, select whether to measure temperature or moisture, and receive the measures directly to your screen.

Scent Measure is triggered from Scent Explore app. When playing Scent Explore, you will be prompted to take a measurement at an important point of interest for scientists and researchers, and thereby contribute to monitoring and analysing your environment.

SCENT Measure application is released under an open source license and is available here

Scent Campaign Manager

The Scent Campaign Manager is a web-based application developed by ICCS for the Scent project, which allows public administrators, policy makers and other interested users to create and manage citizen science campaigns for monitoring and streamlining the collection of environmental information.Learn more

The Scent Campaign Manager allows users to select a specific area of interest to set up a Scent campaign. Citizens can then join the campaign by using the ‘Scent Explore’ and ‘Scent Measure’ apps to take photos of Land-Cover and Land-Use and gather important environmental information about the campaign area.

If you are interested in registering as a user and set up a Scent campaign in your city, town or urban area, please contact ICCS via email at: ScentCampaignManager@lists.scent-project.eu.

Scent Crowdsourcing Platform

The crowdsourcing platform is a key digital infrastructure of the Scent Toolbox, connecting all applications and services and orchestrating their functionality in a purposeful manner.Learn more

It acts as a central data broker that links the Scent frontend applications used by citizens to provide images, annotations, sensory data, event reports and videos, to all the other toolbox components.

The crowdsourcing platform allows local authorities to configure and manage crowdsourcing campaigns, define points of interest where pictures and measurements are needed, and monitor in real-time the pictures collected by citizens and the issues reported.

It also manages the complete lifecycle of citizen-generated images. Once a citizen takes a relevant picture using the Scent Explore app, the picture is sent to the crowdsourcing platform. It stores a copy of the image on the cloud and makes it available to the Scent artificial intelligence ‘heart’, also known as the Scent Intelligence Engine (SIE), which uses advanced machine learning techniques to automatically understand what is in the image. The annotations are fed back to the crowdsourcing platform, which is in charge of deciding whether the quality of the annotations is sufficient. If not, the image is made available for being further annotated, this time by people, through the CAPTCHA plugin or the Scent Collaborate app.

SCENT Measure application is released under an open source license and is available here.

Scent Harmonisation Platform

Considering the constantly increasing volume of citizen-generated data, it is of high importance to ensure that data of different origin are comparable and compatible, whilst facilitating their integration into models and the development of new applications.Learn more

To this end, data collected from citizens should be easily discoverable, accessible, re-usable and available for future use.

Scent meets these aspects of data interoperability through the development of a Harmonisation platform that enables the management, storage and provision of all citizen-generated data and added-value information produced by the various Scent tools (i.e. improved Land Cover / Land Use maps, flood risk maps) and translates them to standardised resources following the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards.

The Harmonisation platform implements also a Data Quality Control system aiming to cope with the following main challenges: correctness/accuracy of the user measurements, user reliability and protection of the system from malicious contributions. Finally, to achieve a maximum impact on scientific research and public policy, these resources will be also offered to the GEOSS portal and other relevant national repositories through a standardized way.

Scent Flood Models

The Scent Toolbox includes hydrodynamic and hydrological models that have been set up for the two pilot areas of Scent; the Danube Delta and the Kifisos catchment. Learn more

The models are computational representations of water dynamics in the pilot areas, and they are initially built using existing ground observations and remote sensing data.

After the Scent field campaigns, the models will be enhanced with crowdsourced data. The value of citizens’ contributions and their role in generating improved flood risk maps and spatiotemporal flooding patterns will be assessed.

The different characteristics of the two areas require different modelling approaches. In the Danube Delta, specifically in the Sontea-Fortuna pilot area, two hydrodynamic models were set up in order to simulate the complex network of channels and lakes in the area: one 1D model and one 1D/2D model.

In the Kifisos catchment, the pilot area is the upstream region of Athens city, where many hydrological components of the water cycle are more influent. A combination of models was therefore set up: a hydrological model connected to a hydrodynamic model at the end of the basin.

These models form a key component of the Toolbox as they serve as a basis for determining how they can be enriched through crowd-sourced data.

Scent Water Tools

Scent enables the collection of river measurements in a uniform way, which is useful to the development of flood models and invariant of the experience of the volunteers to collect the scientific data. Learn more

In order to properly collect river measurements, scientists use a variety of methods that require extended training and can be very time-consuming. To avoid that, the Scent volunteers are simply asked to take a picture of a water level indicator or a video of the predefined floating object and upload it through the gaming applications. The crowdsourced data is then forwarded to two tools that have been specifically designed to automatically extract the water level and the water velocity in a consistent and accurate way.

The water measurement tool uses state of the art image recognition techniques in order to extract the water level from images containing a water level indicator that is half-submerged into water. The goal of the tools is to ‘read’ the indicator and extract the number that is closer to the water level.

The water velocity calculation tool uses innovative video processing algorithms in order to extract the water surface velocity from a video containing a pre-defined floating object moving on the surface of a water body.

the water velocity calculation tool is available here and the water level measurement tool is available here.

Scent Map Segmentation Tool

Scent introduces novel machine learning approaches that automatically detect and annotate segments on satellite and aerial imagery, with land cover / land use (LC/LU) elements that affect flood risk and flood pattern determination (i.e. river banks, forests, buildings, etc). Learn more

Citizen-generated data are utilized for the training of the map segmentation tool, that aims to produce LC/LU maps of improved accuracy which are essential for the construction of hydrodynamic and hydrological models. These models are used to produce flood risk and pattern maps for urban and rural flood cases.

Last but not least, there is a prominent need to include automatic assessment and monitoring of land cover and state of soil in rural and urban areas as well as to detect seasonal changes, natural disasters, and human-related area development. Thus, the map segmentation tool aims to extend current repositories (i.e. GEOSS) by allowing for more frequent updates of local monitoring of land cover/use changes and with higher spatial resolution, using inexpensive crowd-sourcing tools.

Scent Intelligence Engine and Image Analysis Tool

SCENT studies the content of each image, uploaded by the citizens, looking for the information relevant to hydrodynamic modelling of the area. The type of ground cover or riverbank, presence and condition of water drains, and so on, can tell the experts much about the water behaviour in this area in the times of flooding. Learn more

SCENT platform is developed to gather thousands of images, sampling large of urban and nature areas, from the engaged citizens. Once the image comes in, we know where and when it was taken, and there is a piece of partial information on what’s in it, tagged by the author. However, the work only begins here. The Image Analysis Tool, powered by the cutting edge Computer Vision technology and brain-mimicking Deep Neural Networks, carefully analyzes the image, extracting semantic information. What kind of land cover is this – concrete, dirt road, or pasture? Is there buildings and cars or trees and riverbanks? And if there is a storm drain found, is it clean on clogged? All these findings provide important clues on how the water will behave in this area, enabling the hydrologists to make reliable predictions and to prevent casualties and damage.

How can I organise a Scent Campaign?

To organise a Scent citizen science campaign in your area email getinvolved@scent-project.eu. You can also check out the results of our pilot campaigns in Attica, Greece and the Danube Delta, Romania, here. We have also put together a training programme to help you use the Scent Toolbox to collect valuable environmental data.

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Scent Training Resources

September 24, 2019/by Linda Henriksson

Posts

Pages

Scent Toolbox

What is the Scent Toolbox?

Why use the Scent Toolbox?

Who is it for?

How does it work?

Scent Toolbox – Applications

Explore your surroundings with Scent Explore!

Scent Collaborate

Scent Measure

Scent Campaign Manager

Scent Crowdsourcing Platform

Scent Harmonisation Platform

Scent Flood Models

Scent Water Tools

Scent Map Segmentation Tool

Scent Intelligence Engine and Image Analysis Tool

How can I organise a Scent Campaign?

Scent Training

Scent Authority Training

Scent Citizens Training

Scent Cookbook

ScentVR

Additional Resources

Scent Showcase Materials

Presentations

Welcome Session

Smart Technologies for Citizen-Driven Flood Monitoring and Management

Interactive Demonstration

Citizen Science Success Stories and Lessons Learned for Upscaling Such Initiatives

Technical Posters

Scent Showcase

Welcome Session

Smart Technologies for Citizen-Driven Flood Monitoring and Management

Interactive Demonstration: The Scent Toolbox

Roundtable: Challenges and Enables of Citizen Science in Flood Monitoring and Management

Citizen Science Success Stories and Lessons Learned from Upscaling Such Initiatives

Field Trip to the Kifisos River Basin

Presentations

Technical Posters

Scent Appathon

How to Participate

The Prize

Instructions

Criteria

Scent Pilot Campaigns

The Danube Delta, Romania

Kifisos River Basin, Attica, Greece

Newsletter Signup

A note on your privacy and GDPR compliance

SOCIAL STREAMS

Project Partners

Greece

Italy

Israel

Romania

The Netherlands

Ireland

SOCIAL STREAMS

Recommended Reading

SOCIAL STREAMS

Region of Attica

Scent Toolbox Requirements and Architecture

Role in the project

ALL PROJECT PARTNERS

SOCIAL STREAMS

Horizon 2020