A Framework to Enhance Smart Citizen Science in Coastal Areas

Abstract

Life quality in a city can be affected by the way citizens interact with the city. Under a smart city concept, citizens are acting as human sensors reporting natural hazards, generating real-time data and enhancing awareness about environmental issues. This crowdsourcing knowledge supports the city's sustainability and tourism. Specifically, smart seaside cities can fully utilize citizen science data to improve the efficiency of city services, such as smart tourism, smart transportation etc. Environmental assistance and awareness is a beach monitoring issue that could be enhanced through crowdsourcing knowledge. Especially for coastal areas which are under the Natura 2000 network and are characterized as blue flag seas, it is important to identify and map citizens' knowledge. To facilitate this, we introduce a novel framework aimed at: i) utilizing biodiversity data from open source platforms and organizational observations, ii) collecting the knowledge generated from citizens, iii) enhancing citizens' awareness, and iv) reporting environmental issues in their city's coastal areas. The proposed framework exploits these aspects and through the creation of a novel knowledge platform, it aims to provide geospatial, collective awareness applications as an output to support the sustainability of smart coastal spaces.