European Citizen Science

Project Information

ECS

Grant agreement ID: 101058509

DOI

10.3030/101058509

EC signature date 11 May 2022

Start date 1 August 2022

End date 31 July 2026

Funded under

• Reforming and enhancing the European R&I System

Total cost

€ 3 999 043,75

EU contribution

€ 3 999 043,00

Coordinated by

VEREIN DER EUROPAISCHEN BURGEWISSENSCHAFTEN - ECSA EV
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ECS (European Citizen Science)

Reporting period: 2023-08-01 to 2025-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Citizen science has become an important mode of research and innovation, in Europe and worldwide. It has gained recognition across policy, research funding organisations, scientists, civic society organisations, NGOs and those working in the interface of science and society. Today, citizen science associations, national and international citizen science platforms, conferences and funding programmes are key promoters of participatory forms of scientific knowledge production. However, citizen science is still limited in its uptake and acceptance across disciplines, actors and institutions. Its potential has not been fully exploited and we still see a lack of institutional embedding, funding structures and policy uptake.

The ECS project aims to build on the momentum and citizen science’s major success story within FP7 and Horizon 2020 funding schemes to integrate citizen science (cs) within current and future research and innovation efforts, making cs an integral part of the European Research Area (ERA) and positioning Europe as a leader in citizen science. The overall objective of ECS is to enlarge, empower and strengthen the European cs community through capacity building and awareness raising activities, such as setting up the ECS Academy and establishing a network of 28 ECS Ambassadors. The project activities aim to encompass the whole range of needs and challenges, i.e. inclusivity, open data, national and regional support, mainstreaming through disciplines and areas of the ERA, among others

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Project management and coordination efforts continue to use the procedures already established to facilitate and monitor all project work to ensure efficient and effective delivery of the project expected results. Quality assurance processes and data and risk management continue to proceed as established.

We continue to engage existing and new actors in co-design workshops, run community engagement events, liaise with ECSA working groups and other cs projects, work with the selected ECS towards enhancing their local cs communities and enhance the eu-citizen.science platform with new functionalities.


Following the motto of "open and FAIR data with open and FAIR tools", the first data analyst and visualisation was integrated into the ECS Academy, many guidelines for collecting and managing citizen collected data have been developed and capacity and awareness created in several communities through hackathons and datathons.


We continue to work with the network of citizen science educators and trainers in accordance with whom we co-designed the roadmap for their engagement with ECS. We have defined the concept for developing a citizen science competency framework which will further support the training needs identified for different actors. Finally we have delivered several trainings to many different audiences on topics revolving around citizen science.


We remain committed to ensure that we have an intersectional inclusive perspective in the project activities and participants’ involvement. We continuously engage with other projects to discuss inclusive practices and work on common challenges together. As an integral part of this work we engaged several ‘hard to reach’ groups in citizen science through our inclusive pilots and our work with libraries.


Through our communication and dissemination strategy we continued to run communication campaigns dedicated to engaging with different actors and stakeholders. This has ensured harmonised and mutually reinforcing efforts and established collaboration with all consortium partners to effectively communicate project progress and disseminate results. We have developed a clear road map for the development of the business plan where the ECS Academy has been prioritised as the focus of a revenue stream for the maintenance and growth of the platform in general.


We have capitalized on the policy engagement strategy developed and invited policy makers from several focus areas in discussions around increasing the scope and reach of citizen science. We ran high level policy events and paved the way for supporting the CoARA agreement and the co-design of a new CS SDG declaration.


Finally we continue to monitor the envisioned impact pathways for all our work, provide evidence for the achievement of the expected outputs and outcomes, and investigate causal chains and inter-relations to the expected impacts on science, society and economy. We followed the approach established during the first months of the project and measured the impact the consortium actions caused in all the defined impact areas. The results are open and can be seen both in zenodo with a special selection of Impact stories featuring a book.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

ECS stands out by offering a significant number of activities and opportunities for knowledge brokering, co-design and collaboration, building infrastructure for citizen science, providing training and building capacity targeted to a variety of actors, groups and organisations both already part of the citizen science community in Europe and newcomers.

ECS aims to contribute to these expected outcomes:
- Strengthened links and collaboration between citizen science initiatives and other research and innovation actors
- Increased capacity to conduct excellent research and innovation through citizen science, while maximising other potential benefits of citizen science
- Data infrastructures better aligned to the needs of citizen science, and improved data practices employed by citizen science initiatives
- Europe positioned as a leader in citizen science throughout the entire research and innovation system with flourishing and mutually beneficial global collaborations

These outcomes contribute to medium and long-term impacts. The latter will need time to unfold as they will be achieved beyond the project lifetime. The impact assessment of ECS continues to investigate causal chains and interrelations to the expected impacts on science, society and economy by defining impact pathways.

ECS poster - Project at a glance

ECS project logo

Overview of the activities in the project

Group picture at the first project meeting