OneAquaHealth, a project in which SHINE is a partner, is coordinated by the University of Coimbra, a region that also serves as a test site for the solutions being developed. In addition to Coimbra (Portugal), there are research sites in Toulouse (France), Ghent (Belgium), Benevento (Italy) and Oslo, Norway. At the five research sites, researchers are exploring the link between the health of urban aquatic ecosystems and human health. The University of Oslo, responsible for the Norwegian Research Center, kindly hosted the project consortium on its campus.
OneAquaHealth is an excellent example of a heterogeneous collaboration between environmental research partners, technology providers and social scientists. SHINE’s role in this project is to coordinate project activities to involve relevant stakeholders – from environmental agencies to industry and citizens themselves, through methods of social innovation and citizen science.
During the meeting, SHINE organized a collaborative workshop in which the project partners were challenged to co-create and refine the research protocol for carrying out citizen science in the project. The aim is for citizens to play a central role in the scientific process by providing observations on the quality of urban watercourses. This data, combined with scientific environmental observations and geospatial data, will then feed into an information and decision support platform that can help policymakers define policies to improve urban aquatic ecosystems.
The SHINE researchers returned to Portugal with the information and decisions needed to finalize the first version of the Citizen Science protocol, after a pleasant, friendly and productive meeting.