SOCIAL.WATER—CROWDSOURCING SOFTWARE FOR OBTAINING AND PROCESSING CITIZEN SCIENCE OBSERVATIONS

Remote telemetry has a long history at USGS and other hydrologic monitoring organizations, enabling real-time hydrologic data presentation on the Web. Citizen volunteers have also long contributed to hydrologic data collection. Today, the opportunity exists to combine these two ways of collecting information. Ubiquitous text messaging and email-capable mobile phones mean nearly everyone can provide telemetric data if they know what information to provide and the infrastructure to accept the information exists: this is “crowdsourcing.”

Crowdhydrology.org, a crowdsourcing project in New York, was implemented by posting signs near stream staff gages inviting passersby to send text messages reporting the value they read on the gage. Social.Water is a tool developed to automatically accept and interpret these messages, generate data tables and graphical results, and post them on the Web. Social.Water was written using open-source codes and protocols for reading and interpreting text messages that were forwarded to an email account and ultimately used to update a database. Results are also reported to the Web in near real time. Initial validation with conventional techniques shows favorable quality of crowdsourced data.