Smart Toolbox for Engaging Citizens into a People-Centric Observation Web
Scent is a European Union research project funded under the Horizon 2020 programme. The project runs between 2016 and 2019 and comprises 10 partner organisations across 6 countries.
Europe has the capacity and potential to lead a global citizen movement aimed at land use monitoring through a people-centred observation web. Scent will be this movement.
Scent will engage citizens in environmental monitoring and enable them to become the ‘eyes’ of the policy makers. In doing so citizens will support the monitoring of land-cover/use changes using their smartphones and tablets.
The project will demonstrate the huge potential of citizen observation and monitoring of the environment. A people-led online observation movement will capture land-cover use and changes through user-friendly tools and technologies, The Scent Toolbox. This will complement existing forms of monitoring such as satellite and remote sensing which are costly and less dynamic.
The Scent Toolbox; a crowd-sourcing platform, gaming applications, an authoring tool, an intelligence engine and numerical models, allows citizens, policy makers and other users to freely use Scent technologies to contribute to the aims of the project. The opinions of citizens, policy makers and communication experts will be taken into account during the design of the Scent Toolbox to ensure it is practical and user-friendly.
The Scent toolbox will be tested in two large scale pilots; the urban case of the Kifisos river in Attica, Greece and the rural case of the Danube Delta in Romania. The impact of the toolbox in the assessment of flood risks and flooding patterns will be evaluated.
The consortium covers the complete stakeholder chain: industries in machine learning, SMEs in crowd-sourcing, gaming and awareness-raising, leading research institutes with expertise in hydrodynamic modelling, data harmonisation and authoring tools and environmental monitoring, NGOs at the pilot sites and policy makers/public bodies.