Today, the six projects selected by the first ACTION open call kick-off their activities in a dedicated 3 days event hosted by the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin. In the next months they will be working with the ACTION team by co-designing and testing new tools for making CS more open, innovative, sustainable and inclusive for all.

Here a brief description of the new ACTION CS projects:

CitiComPlastic will co-create solutions for bioplastic waste management through composting, and will do so, working at local level in Oslo (Norway) with vulnerable groups and other community members.

In my backyard aims to understand and map the use of pesticides and fertilizers and sustainable alternative practices in the context of home farming and gardening. The pilot area is the Neiva river mouth area, in the municipality of Esposende, Portugal.

NOISE MAPS will support citizens in generating and analysing urban sound data, empowering Barcellona communities to take action to reduce unwanted noise and protect their local sonic heritage.

Sonic Kayak is a low-cost open hardware system for gathering and mapping fine-scale marine environmental data. Data is sonified through an onboard speaker allowing paddlers (including partially sighted and visually impaired people) to seek out areas of interest and gain real time feedback of the data. This tool and its further development will be at the centre of the project of the same name, which will be implemented in Cornwall, UK.

Water for Future tackles heavy metal water pollution in and around the city of Cerro de Pasco, Peru. Local youth and community members will gather data on water quality and will develop monitoring strategies and actions for tackling this issue.

WOWNature deals with air quality in the Po Valley, in Northern Italy and it will do so by measuring air pollution with innovative sensors within and outside urban forests in order to assess their efficacy as a mitigation measure for air pollution, facilitate their funding and educate and engage with citizens.

More information here: https://actionproject.eu/citizen-science-projects/