CITIZEN SCIENCE FOR WATER QUALITY MONITORING APPLYING FOSS

Abstract. Citizen science is an efficient tool for data collection for scientific projects. In the framework of SIMILE Interreg Italy-Switzerland project, the citizen’s contribution to monitor the quality of lakes water has been envisaged. In the initial phase of this research, state of art of citizen science and water quality monitoring was investigated. The analysis of past and current projects, governed by different organizations and communities, pointed out a variety of tasks that can be accomplished by citizens. In these studies, authors stressed suitability of smartphones for the fulfilment of various assignments given to citizens. Due to that, in this research, different smartphone applications for water quality monitoring were tested and analyzed. Despite the fact that many applications for water quality monitoring are freely available, none of them is open source. Hence, this paper is proposing the design of a new application, for the purposes of SIMILE project, that will be free and open source, addressing not just users but also developers giving them a possibility for customization and improvement.