Degree Discipline

States

Long-Term Citizen Science Water Monitoring Data: An Exploration of Accuracy over Space and Time (open access)

Long-Term Citizen Science Water Monitoring Data: An Exploration of Accuracy over Space and Time

The Texas Stream Team (TST) is one of an increasing number of citizen science water monitoring programs throughout the US which have been continuously collecting surface water quality data under quality assurance protocols for decades. Volunteer monitoring efforts have generated monitoring datasets that are long-term, continuous, and cover a large geographic area - characteristics shown to be valuable for scientists and professional agencies. However, citizen science data has been of limited use to researchers due to concerns about the accuracy of data collected by volunteers, and the decades of water quality monitoring data collected by TST volunteers is not widely used, if at all. A growing body of studies have attempted to address accuracy concerns by comparing volunteer data to professional data, but this has rarely been done with large-scale, existing datasets like those collected by TST. This study assesses the accuracy of the volunteer water quality data collected across the state of Texas by the TST citizen science program between 1992-2017 by comparing it to professional data from corresponding stations during the same time period, as well as comparing existing and experimental data from a local TST partner agency. The results indicate that even large-scale, existing volunteer and professional …
Date: December 2018
Creator: Albus, Kelly
System: The UNT Digital Library