Summary
Exploring how community‑driven data collection can enhance water quality monitoring and inform decision‑making by creating a clear process for what to do after Citizen Science (CS) has found an issue.
The Challenge
Citizen Science activities are increasingly identifying issues in watercourses, but there is currently no consistent process for what happens next. This challenge aims to develop a protocol that outlines the actions to take once a problem has been detected, including:
- Developing a key set of KPIs
- Supporting visualisation of CS findings
- Creating a hierarchy of response (water companies, the Environment Agency (EA) and catchment groups)
- Establishing standard approaches across a catchment
Timeframe: 6 months
Call to Action
Members are invited to:
- Submit ideas on how this post‑alert protocol could work in practice
- Endorse promising ideas contributed by others
- Comment to share insights, examples, or considerations from your own catchment
- Coalesce into a project team during the next stage to take this challenge forward and co‑develop the protocol