EAGER: Citizen science as a tool for temporal water quality assessment at the major watershed scale

University Of Nebraska At Omaha, Omaha NE

Investigators

Abstract

1644595 Kolok The Mississippi River basin, from Lake Itasca, Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, stretches over 2,300 miles and travels through or along the border of 10 different states. The river receives major inputs of water, sediment and nutrients from four major sub-watersheds: the Upper Mississippi River, the Missouri River, the Ohio River and the Arkansas/Red River. It is thought that water quality is responsible for the low oxygen concentrations in the Gulf of Mexico, known as the Dead Zone, near where the Mississippi discharges into the Gulf. Relative to this watershed, public participation in scientific research can be a valuable resources for data collection. Samples which are repeated and simultaneously taken in different locations can estimate the temporal variability of a compound's occurrence at specific priority sites. Second, since the sampling is mobile, sampling can be adjusted quickly if the environmental conditions change. Therefore, the long-term goal of this project is to build a national citizen science network that can monitor for contaminants in water across geographical scales that are too large to be efficiently sampled using traditional methods. This research is novel, as it can provide large amounts of simultaneously collected data across a wide geography. Such data collection would not be possible with standard methods and technologies. To fulfill this objective, it will be necessary to satisfy the following specific aims: 1) Evaluate the capacity for citizen scientists to collect repeatable and quantitative data on nutrients and turbidity. 2) To leverage information technology using mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) to capture the data and validate the data integrity for further analysis. 3) To conduct a citizen science campaign within the Mississippi River watershed that will produce spatially and temporally robust quantitative data sets on water quality parameters across the region. The citizen scientists will be provided with commercially available assessment test strips for phosphate, nitrate, and atrazine and will be given a device to estimate turbidity. They will then submit their data via an interactive IT data management system currently under development. To address data integrity, a series of laboratory trials, focusing on experts, as well as experienced and naive citizen scientists, will evaluate the accuracy and reproducibility of water quality data obtained from citizen scientists. It is anticipated that by the end of the study, a series of protocols will be developed to assure data quality and reliability from the citizen scientists collecting data on nutrients, agrichemicals and turbidity. This project can be a model that other scientists, both nationally and internationally, can use to develop monitoring programs that use citizens to collect quality data. In addition to the collection of the data, by partnering with the Nebraska Watershed Network on this project, citizen science participation will bring awareness of environmental issues by bringing science education to life among the Omaha, Nebraska community, to the state of Nebraska, and to the Midwestern United States as a whole. Furthermore, personal visits to K-12 classes, presentations to the public, and information distributed via social media (including two webpages, two Facebook pages, and a listserv) are all being used to leverage the results from a social media campaign into community education and awareness.