How to make use of citizen environmental sensing data?

Citizen science is widely used for scientific research. The rapid developing sensor technology promotes this even further. The low
cost and miniaturized sensors give citizens new tools to collect environmental data. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean large
impact has been realised. The combination of citizen sensed data with data from formal environmental monitoring networks is
still challenging.
Similarly to other citizen science projects, the data quality is a critical issue to make sense of citizen environmental sensing. In this
study, we investigate the challenges of citizen environmental sensing and propose a conceptual model which integrates informal
citizen environmental sensing with formal data sources from official organizations. The data issues are not just the quality but also
trust in the data. According to the experience from Amsterdam Smart Citizens Lab (ASCL) project, help from experts for citizen
sensing is appreciated. On the other hand, official organizations are also interested on potential of citizen environmental sensing,
even though some of them may feel threatened too. Often, citizens are more aware of their local environmental problems or
questions. They are also enthusiastic to participate citizen sensing campaigns. However, they usually do not have the abilities to
process and analysis the data to make sense of it. The ASCL and Urban AirQ projects, which are ongoing in the city of Amsterdam,
will be used to analyse the importance of perception from both citizens and official organizations’ perspectives. The perception
will lead to an integration model which use official data source for citizen sensing data quality assurance and control, this in turn
makes it possible to combine citizen sensed data with official data to produce high spatial temporal environmental information.