Evaluating the Social Health and Wellbeing Benefits of CaSTCo Citizen Science

Citizen science is a valuable source of data for environmental monitoring, but citizen science has
many more benefits than just producing scientific data – it benefits society by informing effective
decision-making, and benefits participants directly. Here we evaluated the benefits to
participants in taking part in river water monitoring.

This study was commissioned by Anglian Water as part of the multi-stakeholder Catchment
Systems Thinking Cooperative (CaSTCo) project. CaSTCo is creating a national standardised
framework for how citizen science can be integrated with professional monitoring to generate
impactful data and decisions for rivers.

We explored the range of benefits to citizen scientist participants through three approaches:

• a review of evidence in the scientific literature;
• a survey of CaSTCo-trained volunteers; and
• a case study of the ‘photovoice’ methodology used by volunteers in Norfolk.
  Based on these, we make recommendations for future citizen science project design.