USING CITIZEN SCIENCE AS A CORE TOOL FOR WATER RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND FORECASTING: CLOSING THE PROFESSIONAL AND CITIZEN SCIENCE GAP

Public engagement in water resource management tends to be unidirectional as the flow of information moves from professional scientists to citizens. While there is a rich history of citizen science participation, the integration of these data, at times, has fallen short due range of valid concerns by the professional science community (i.e. data accuracy, time commitment, data resolution, etc). However, this situation need not persist. Results presented here show how citizen science-based observations can be incorporated into numerical models to support management of ecological habitats in streams and provide information on health and human safety during floods in urban environments. The research presented here first details the success in integrating the bidirectional flow of information between citizen and professional scientists to support an ecohydrological model that simulates stream flow and temperature. The modeling results show improvements in hydrologic forecasts of stream flow and temperature, which are correlated with increased citizen science participation. Our second example details results from the active development of a flood monitoring network, which demonstrates the emerging opportunities in engaging citizen scientists and highlights how these data can be useful for both education and safety. Finally, methodology and results are generalized to show how citizen participation rates change in space and time as well as what methods have been the most successful engagement techniques to collect useful data. In presenting these results our goal is to encourage professional scientist to rethink their relationships with the general public and consider the wide range of opportunities to engage with citizen scientists.