Outcomes of the Water-ForCE Workshop on Citizen Science for validation of water related satellite products

Water-ForCE is a H2020 Coordination and Support Action focused on analyzing the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and bottlenecks of the current provision of water-related services in the Copernicus Earth Observation (EO) programme. The project will result (by the end of 2023) in a roadmap document based on wide community consultation and expert knowledge and  opinion.

Part of the Working Package 4 (WP4) Aligning in situ and satellite Earth Observation activities there is the Task 4.4 - Integration of alternative data sources which aims to identify possible integration between satellite remote sensing data streams and in situ data networks  to complement or validate EO-based products.

To understand how Citizen Science could be used for the validation of satellite products for water, a group of experts was invited to answer a pre-workshop survey and they were also invited to take part in an on-line  workshop entitled “Citizen Science for the CAL/VAL of satellite aquatic products” held on October 11th, 2022 to discuss the following topics:

• Citizen Science Initiatives

• Citizen Science Challenges

• Citizen Science data harmonization, storing and sharing

This report includes the results of the pre-workshop survey for selected experts on citizen science as well as all recommendations collected during the workshop from invited speakers and breakout discussion groups. These recommendations were grouped by their relevance to common themes:

• Data gaps

• Data management

• Resourcing/Funding

• Coordination

This overview will be input to further drafting of the Roadmap, which will again be open to community feedback. In the meantime, we welcome any comments on this overview from the workshop on Citizen Science through the project and respective WP leads.