CitiObs project seeks alliances with citizen science initiatives to strengthen environmental monitoring in European cities

Citizen science initiatives are increasingly valuable for monitoring the environmental health of cities. The European project CitiObs seeks to forge partnerships with up to 30 citizen observatories to make their impact transcend borders and make their observations more reliable and accessible for political action and decision-making at local, national and global levels. The open call seeks to provide customized tools, training and networking opportunities to citizen science projects working on urban environmental issues such as air quality, noise pollution or urban heat.  

Interested projects can apply on the CitiObs website until the end of October. The selected initiatives will become ‘Alliance Cases’ and will be incorporated into the activities planned by CitiObs during November and December. CitiObs is a European project that promotes citizen science initiatives to enable citizens to be part of the solution for more liveable, sustainable and inclusive cities.  

What resources are offered?

The CitiObs project offers the possibility to access manuals that include resources on how to co-create citizen actions, how to improve inclusion and diversity, how to address conflicts and improve cooperation, or how to work from an artistic or creative perspective.  

Good practices on how to choose and use low-cost sensors to measure PM2.5 particles, noise and temperature are also provided. Likewise, CitiObs offers recommendations on how to build an interoperable data architecture to integrate databases with each other. This allows, for example, to create noise pollution maps not only for a city but for the whole of Europe or to look for the relationship between air quality and health or biodiversity. In addition, customized training is offered to help citizen science professionals to include algorithms in their databases that assess the quality of their observations by labelling them according to how reliable they are.  

In addition, participation as an “Alliance Case” ensures a trip to one of the cities where CitiObs is already applying its methodology, as well as connections to other communities of practice, FabLabs and Maker Spaces.  

What is CitiObs?  

The CitiObs project aims to strengthen citizen observatories across Europe, helping them to create, improve and expand the environmental observations collected by citizens.

CitiObs is a four-year project funded by the European Commission's Horizon Europe and that supports initiatives such as GEOSS and GEO in the framework of the European Green Deal.