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Delft, The Netherlands, 22 Jul 2016

New H2020 citizen science project ‘Ground Truth 2.0’

The new H2020 project ‘Ground Truth 2.0: Environmental knowledge discovery of human sensed data’, starting on 1 September 2016, aims to demonstrate and validate six scaled up citizen observatories in real operational conditions, in EU and Africa. UNESCO-IHE coordinates the project, with Dr. Uta Wehn as Project Director and 14 partner organisations. The project also offers a PhD fellowship on Citizen Science.

Sustainable citizen observatories for smart resources management

Citizen observatories enable citizens (and not just scientists and professionals) to collect and share data about the environment. Ground Truth 2.0 will strengthen the feedback-loop in the information chain: from citizen-based data collection to knowledge sharing for joint decision-making and cooperative planning. The overall objectives of Ground Truth 2.0 are to implement sustainable citizen observatories for the demonstration of their societal and economic benefits, and the global market uptake of the Ground Truth 2.0 concept and enabling technologies. The project uses a trans-disciplinary approach  which consists of a multi-actor innovation process to combine the social dimensions of citizen observatories with enabling technologies so that their customisation and deployment is tailored to the envisaged societal and economic impacts of the respective observatories. 

It focuses on environmental indicators in urban and rural areas related to spatial planning issues, with a specific focus on flora and fauna as well as water availability and water quality for land and natural resources management. This is supported by an innovative web-based service for worldwide mapping and updating of land use.

The demonstration cases (4 EU and 2 African) cover the full 'spectrum’ of citizen-sensed data usage and citizen engagement, and therefore allow testing and validating of the concept and technologies, and evaluation of their impacts under a range of conditions. The project will start on 1 September 2016 and last for 3 years.

The Ground Truth 2.0 consortium consists of 14 partners, from industry, SME, NGO, government, research and academia. Project Director Dr. Uta Wehn says: “With Ground Truth 2.0, UNESCO-IHE continues with citizen science from other projects (e.g. WeSenseIt  ‘Citizen Observatories of Water’). We are combining our expertise in stakeholder participation, governance and innovation studies from the social sciences with know-how of ecohydrological modelling and hydro-informatics. It will be particularly interesting to see whether and how we can help the African cases leapfrog to smart natural resources management.”

 This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon  2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No  689744.
 

Partners

PhD fellowship on citizen science: apply now!

UNESCO-IHE offers a dynamic and challenging PhD fellowship on citizen science. The deadline for applications is 21 August 2016. The fellowship starts on 1 September 2016 and has a duration of four years. Interested?

Find out more here.