Laura Criscuolo

Approaches that are transdisciplinary and participatory can help to address complex socio-ecological issues by integrating multiple disciplinary perspectives while taking into account the different needs and experiences of community members and other stakeholders. Despite this promise, such approaches are rarely applied within the scientific community, as researchers and public actors often lack the training, practice and reference cases required to handle the working relationships and translations of terminology, ideas and values across multiple bodies of knowledge. A case study described in this manuscript depicts a group of researchers, artists and citizens consciously engaged in the construction of a transdisciplinary process as part of a 40-day ‘citizen science’ experiment focussed on assessing soil fertility in the urban area of Milan, Italy. The group drew from recognised scientific approaches, applied agronomic methodologies, artistic practices and technological tools, integrating them into a hybrid process of collective and participatory inquiry. As a quantitative outcome of the experiment, a dataset of bio-chemical parameters was generated, which was enriched by agronomic interpretations but also by artistic and reflective materials. Importantly, the process developed transdisciplinary and participatory skills, as it created a potentially replicable procedure of engagement, analysis and presentation for use in other citizen science settings. This article presents the context, the multiple objectives of the research and the applied approach and its timeline. Described in detail are the process of designing and conducting the experiment by involving an extended research community—including both junior and senior researchers—in progressive steps. Quantitative and qualitative results are provided. The findings are meant to contribute case material and methods to inform the advancement of transdisciplinary research approaches within the scientific community as well as examples of ways to transcend the boundaries of science to include artists and community stakeholders. The aspiration is to inform and inspire concrete application of transdisciplinary and participatory methods in concert to address complex socio-environmental challenges.

Lockdown measures adopted in Italy to contain the diffusion of Covid-19 altered many variables influencing the anthropogenic pressure on marine ecosystems. Public reactions included surprise at how quickly changes in human activity seemingly improved natural recovery and, at the same time, a generalized anxiety to restart economic activities. In this situation several Institutions from the Italian National Research Council (CNR) made a joint effort to quantify the effects of the unprecedented experimental conditions induced by the reduction of many anthropogenic pressures. The resulting project was conceived with a holistic, interdisciplinary approach, geared to combine scientific, economic and cultural observations to promote collective actions suitable to the governance of socio-ecological systems, reconciling respect for the environment with human activities and wellbeing, and thus grounding an ethical approach to marine resources. Alongside collecting considerable amount of scientific observations, the project is working to complement samplings and analyses with the non-formal knowledge carried by the inhabitants of a set of coastal zones, thus enriching the generated knowledge and widening inclusion and pluralism in defining the challenges at stake; simultaneously it focuses on stimulating a reflection in the research community over the process of knowledge co-construction, its meaning, role and responsibility in the societal context. After a brief contextualization of this activity, we present here the perspective adopted by researchers to build a responsible marine research plan, inclusive on the grounds of both involved actors and knowledge sources. We comment the process- and community-related features, explore limits and opportunities, and propose a set of recommendations, based on a preliminary review of our experience and oriented to promote the development of a shared Ocean ethics.

In the last decade, citizen science (CS) has seen a renewed interest from both traditional science and the lay public as testified by a wide number of initiatives, projects, and dedicated technological applications. One of the main reasons for this renewed interest lies in the fact that the ways in which citizen science projects are designed and managed have been significantly improved by the recent advancements in information and communications technologies (ICT), especially in the field of geoinformatics. In this research work, we investigate currently active citizen science projects that involve geoinformation to understand how geoinformatics is actually employed. To achieve this, we define eight activities typically carried out during the implementation of a CS initiative as well as a series of approaches for each activity, in order to pinpoint distinct strategies within the different projects. To this end, a representative set of ongoing CS initiatives is selected and surveyed. The results show how CS projects address the various activities, and report which strategies and technologies from geoinformatics are massively or marginally used. The quantitative results are presented, supported by examples and descriptions. Finally, cues and critical issues coming from the research are discussed.

Despite Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) activities are now extremely helpful in a number of scientific applications, researchers and decision makers oppose some resistance to the usage of volunteered contributions, due to quality issues. Several methods and workflows have been proposed to face quality issues in different VGI projects, usually built ad-hoc for specific datasets, thus resulting neither extensible nor transferable. In order to overcome this weakness, the authors propose to perform an user-driven assessment on VGI items in order to filter only those that satisfy minimally acceptable quality levels defined according to their specific quality requirements and project goals. In the present work the users, i.e., information consumers, are seen as decision makers and are allowed to set the minimum acceptable quality levels Thus the approach proposes a user driven assessment of the fitness for use of VGI items. The paper first briefly presents a view on VGI components and suitable quality indices, then it describes a logic architecture for managing them and for enabling a querying mechanism to the datasets. The approach is finally exemplified with a case study simulation.

Initiatives that rely upon the contributions of volunteers to reach a specific goal are growing more and more with the success of Web 2.0–interactive applications. Also scientific projects are testing and exploiting volunteers' collaboration, but the quality of information obtained with this approach is often puzzling. This paper offers a rich overview of many scientific projects where geographic contributions are committed to volunteers, to the aim of defining strategies to improve information quality. By describing real examples of Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI), the contribution establishes a categorization based on the characteristics of the information, tasks, and scopes of the projects. After a discussion on the relationships of categories and VGI quality, the paper analyses techniques to improve the quality of volunteered information according to the moment of its assessment (i.e., ex ante, ex post, or both with respect to information creation). The paper outlines the main limitations of the different approaches and indicates some guidelines for future developments.

European Alpine glaciology has a long tradition of studies and activities, in which researchers have often relied on the field work of some specialized volunteer operators. Despite the remarkable results of this cooperation, some problems in field data harmonization and in covering the whole range of monitored glaciers are still present. Moreover, dynamics of reduction, fragmentation and decline, which in recent decades characterize Alpine glaciers, make more urgent the need to improve spatial and temporal monitoring, still maintaining adequate quality standards. Scientific field monitoring activities on Alpine glaciers run parallel to a number of initiatives by individuals and amateur associations, keepers of alternative, experiential and para-scientific knowledge of the glacial environment. Problems of harmonization, coordination, recruitment and updating can be addressed with the help of a collaborative approach—citizen science-like—in which the scientific coordination guarantees information quality and web 2.0 tools operate as mediators between expert glaciologists and non-expert contributors. This paper gives an overview of glaciological information currently produced in the European Alpine region, representing it in an organized structure, functional to the discussion. An empowering solution is then proposed, both methodological and technological, for the integration of multisource data. Its characteristics, potentials and problems are discussed.