Education for Climate Community Café - How do you become an Energy Community?
AURORA - Joint event with the Education for Climate Group Community Café 10th September 2025 from 17.00hrs - 18.00hrs Topic School Energy Communities To join the event register here - https://education-for-climate.ec.europa.eu/community/challenge_hub/event/community-cafe-september, This is an exciting event where you can learn about how the Palomeras Cultural Centre School in Spain has pioneered the first school Energy Community in Madrid with the AURORA project. The school, in a working class area of Madrid, has installed solar energy on the roof tops of their buildings, along with two air source heat pumps to keep the classrooms cool in summer. Funds of €140,000 have been raised from their community, staff and parents of the school, along with students and professors from the Technical University of Madrid as part of a share offer. This means everyone can have a stake in the energy transition. Lower energy bills, no capital cost to the school and a small return on investments from everyone supporting the scheme. It really is true that such transformations not only lower carbon emissions, supporting efforts to reach net zero carbon, but they also lower costs by diverting what would have been fossil fuel profits, back into the local community. The renewable energy generated will also be tracked via the AURORA energy tracker app to allow investors to see the energy being generated and to offset their own personal carbon emissions based on the investment they have made. It will join other projects at Aarhus University Denmark and Ljubljana University Slovenia already connected to the AURORA Energy Tacker app . Could schools in your country follow their lead and be the first school in your town, in your city, moving away from fossil fuels towards the future of clean renewable energy. A teacher from the school will explain what it is has meant to the students and staff of the Palomeras Cultural Centre school in Spain. The whole café event will be an opportunity for open discussion, facilitated by Martin Brocklehurst from the AURORA PROJECT, so that you can understand how to follow the lead that has been set. Looking to the future EU Legislation has also recently changed allowing the export of surplus renewable energy from community energy schemes through the grid to be sold to users around the installation. Once enacted into National law this would allow the export of surplus energy from Schools during holiday periods to users around the school. A great idea for public swimming pools for instance seeking to heat the pool during the summer holidays when usage rates are at their highest. The future looks bright for community energy schemes. In the UK, once the Governments strange block on Power Purchase Agreements on public buildings is removed we can perhaps also follow the EU lead and recommence community energy schemes on schools buildings.
Let’s imagine training for facilitators in citizen science projects!
ECS and ECSA will be present at the Ecsite conference 2024 (https://ecsite.wildapricot.org/Programme/). Discover and share skills and training methods to facilitate participatory research and citizen science projects. Science centers and museums, universities and third-places are key players in participatory citizen science projects. These programs aim to give citizens their place in the production of knowledge, and can range from the simple collection of scientific data to the co-construction or even co-governance of research projects. In recent years, these approaches have beenstriving to become a mainstream approach to scientific research well beyond the classical topics connected to environment and biodiversity. But citizen science faces many challenges, such as reliable data, recruitment and participation of citizens or reluctance to use this approach by scientists and researchers. A less discussed issue, and perhaps a solution to some of these challenges, is that of the skills needed to facilitate this type of project. Indeed it is essential to create the conditions for dialogue and work for all stakeholders (research teams, citizens, partners, associations...). They need support to create together, transform their perspectives, adapt tools to their context, stay involved, understand each other in depth…What specific skills, knowledge and attitudes do facilitators need in these participatory projects? Could a training programme in facilitation and participation help? This session will offer a feedback from institutions involved in citizen science (inter)mediation and facilitation training. These short presentations will break down the problem into several sub-questions. They will form the basis of the workshop, during which participants will collectively identify the list of skills and training methods that are most relevant for the people in charge of facilitating particpatory citizen science projects. Speakers: Catherine Oualian (Universcience, France), Claudia Aguirre Rios (Groupe TRACES, France), Aoife Taylor (Trinity College, Ireland), Simona Cerrato (ECSA), Paul Boniface (Groupe TRACES, France).
Join us as we explore the transformative potential of Citizen Science in shaping the future of research and innovation in Europe and beyond. The webinar is organized within the scope of the PolSCA Horizon Webinars series, targeting research managers, project administrators, and researchers operating in Poland. Its goal is to enhance understanding of citizen engagement, the multi-actor approach, and social readiness concepts in the context of the second Strategic Plan for the Horizon Europe program, upcoming calls within the Work Programmes 2025, and the increasing importance of citizen science in R&D projects. Citizen Science, endorsed by the European Commission and encapsulated within the Horizon Europe programme, represents a paradigm shift in research and development. It champions a multi-actor approach, inviting citizens to actively participate in scientific endeavors, from data collection to analysis, thus democratizing the scientific process. Within the framework of Horizon Europe, Citizen Science serves as a catalyst for social readiness, fostering inclusivity, transparency, and trust in research and innovation.
University of Warsaw Library, …
#TranskriBUWmaraton is an event from 3 to 30 April 2023 as part of the Citizen Science Month celebrations. All interested readers and supporters of University of Warsaw Library will have the opportunity to cooperate in discovering, reading and transcribing historical handwritten documents, within a dedicated group on the FB profile of the University of Warsaw Library. This time we invited our colleagues from faculty libraries to cooperate. Especially for this occasion they chose interesting, rare and often surprising materials. Among them there are marginalia of one of the most eccentric Polish artists, handwritten maps, certificates labeling unique geological specimens and descriptions of plants from the so-called Hundred-year-old Herbarium. Together, we will try to unravel one of the unexplained mysteries of the Second World War, hidden in an encrypted and unread document from the collection of the Manuscripts Department of the University of Warsaw Library. And this is just a small part of what awaits you this year! We invite the entire academic community and all interested parties - both amateurs and specialists in their fields - to help in making historical sources more accessible and useful. As part of the project, for four weeks in April, we will be posting scans of selected handwritten documents on the TranskriBUW Facebook group. The task consist in reading and rewriting the text of the documents as precisely as possible and publishing the prepared transcripts in the comments section. The correctness of all prepared transcripts will be verified by University of Warsaw Library employees, who will further decide to link them to the scans of manuscripts placed in the Crispa. Digital Library of the University of Warsaw (https://crispa.uw.edu.pl/). Transcriptions will improve the readability as well as facilitate search and access to these handwritten documents. Everyone will be able to use them freely. The language of the event is Polish.
Driving changes to embed Citizen Science at your institution
Join this TIME4CS online interactive workshop to learn how you can contribute to fostering the adoption of citizen science as research methodology within your organization through the use of institutional roadmaps. You will have the chance to: - Discuss challenges and opportunities for citizen science in your institution - Learn about using institutional roadmaps as a tool for change - Co-create your own Grounding Action with the TIME4CS Reflection Tool! Hands-on session using our tool, designed to support the development of personalized action plans: reflect on the big vision for your organization, identify relevant stakeholders, define success criteria and necessary resources, and make your action plan. Takeaway for participants: - Identify institutional resources and support needed for CS - some concrete examples and suggestions on how to stimulate institutional changes to promote CS
Water-ForCE H2020 - Citizen Science for the CAL/VAL of satellite aquatic products
In situ data acquisition is an expensive process that needs high-frequency and broad spatial coverage to be fully useful in remote sensing calibration and/or validation exercises. An important new source of spatially intensive data acquisition, the crowd sourcing carried out inside of Citizen Science initiatives, has been developed in previous projects within the EU by, among other things, the development of tools and citizen observatories solutions. We will hear the experiences of Citizen Science tools developers and users and Citizen Science experts, as a basis for discussion during our expert panel time afterwards. Our aim is to fully explore the possibilities of Citizen Science for calibration and validation of Copernicus water quality and quantity products, focused in the identification of: Opportunities/potential for Cal/Val Gaps & problems Identified Needs Data Quality, format and uncertainties
Cos4Cloud and its services for the citizen science community
Cos4Cloud is a EU-funded project that is co-designing, prototyping and implementing a number of new tools and services that address the technological challenges shared by citizen observatories. These services can help citizen observatories to improve data and information quality of observations and can be used as modules, so that any existing citizen science observatory will be able to choose and install the technological services they wish. In this webinar, we will give a short introduction of the project and present two of the services developed: MOBIS and FASTCAT-Cloud. MOBIS is a service to create integrative citizen science apps where you can report all your environmental and biodiversity observations in one Android or iOS app. FASTCAT (Flexible Ai System for CAmera Traps)-Cloud is an open website service that allows you to automatically filter out most unwanted pictures and video streams, keeping images of animals, and to integrate machine learning technology, among other things. The presentations will be followed by a Q&A with speakers. The webinar will last one hour. After closing the webinar we will keep the Zoom channel open for participants to ask further questions and make suggestions about how Cos4Cloud can benefit their citizen science project(s).
We are organising an hybrid scientific session at the Ocean Science Meeting, 27 Feb - 4 March 2022 on ‘The uptake of data by citizen scientists, aggregators and end-users: successes, challenges and gaps in the dataflow’ and are inviting you to submit an abstract by 29 September 2021. Please find more details of the session below. OD11 The uptake of data by citizen scientists, aggregators and end-users: successes, challenges and gaps in the dataflow Keywords: Citizen science, marine data, dataflow, interoperability, acceptance, engagement, policy, data management, validation, end user needs, sustainability, impact Organizers: Patrick Gorringe, patrick.gorringe@smhi.se, James Sprinks, jsprinks@earthwatch.org.uk, Peter Thijsse, peter@maris.nl, Emilie Breviere, emilie.breviere@smhi.se Citizen science is a particularly impactful channel to collect data and its utility has been proven on small scales, yet the groundbreaking, and absolutely necessary, potential of citizen science has yet to be realized. Over the last decade, marine citizen science projects have provided a cost-effective means to collect extensive data sets covering vast spatio-temporal scales where conventional data collection is limited in operation, such as coastal seas. However many initiatives fail to be sustainable, and fail to reach acceptance of their data by scientists and by policy makers. To be efficient and successful a project should provide data with sufficient quality, structure and availability to be used by professionals and ensure that citizen scientists realize and appreciate the impact of their contribution towards the understanding of the scientific big picture. When studying the flow of citizen science data, it follows a series of steps from the providers to the users, via data aggregators. The essential steps of this process are the acquisition, management, flow in key infrastructure, evaluation and impact analyses, use in ocean models, research and forecasting, and public visualization. The objective of the co-organizers is to provide a session during which participants will share experiences on successes and failures, needs and limitations in the data flow chain. The session wishes to be a unique niche for the numerous actors of the data flow in marine citizen science initiatives to meet and exchange. It will explore current and future collaborations, hear from invited experts about wider citizen science initiatives and discuss how marine data aggregators in its next phase can more systematically link with citizen science to not only expand the data provision from citizen science, but also find ways to encourage citizen science to work closer with data aggregators across the full value chain.
Nature is vitally important, and nature is in trouble, but we can all help with nature’s recovery by helping fill in the gaps in what we know about the species on our doorsteps. By looking out for wildlife in your own neighbourhood, you can support vital conservation research whilst connecting with nature and enjoying the outdoors. That is why this September, researchers, school groups, citizens and wildlife enthusiasts across the continent are coming together in a race against the clock to put nature on the map, submitting photos and observations of wildlife in their neighbourhoods through the free, easy to use iNaturalist mobile phone app. Join an epic race for wildlife this September as citizens across Europe take part in the worlds’ first 48 hour continental BioBlitz!