In the past decade, citizen science has become a proven and accepted methodology across a wide range of scientific disciplines, able to collect new and complementary data which both enhances and adds context to existing data collection methods. By upscaling to a transnational level, citizen science could collect, analyse and exploit a vast amount of data across the ERA and beyond, achieving a higher impact through creating a multinational community of citizen scientists. However, many citizen science initiatives start at a small-scale, facing technical, practical and conceptual changes when attempting to upscale to a wider level, with current EU mechanisms and other networks not providing the support, coordination or resources required to assist their effort. CROPS aspires to inform and evolve the EU Research & Innovation system so that it can adequately support the transition of citizen science from small-scale to a Europe-wide level, moving it towards a modern, open-science approach. It will identify the most suitable citizen science initiatives for upscaling to the Europe-wide level, and in doing so will develop protocols, resources and examples of best practice for the upscaling of citizen science activities, helping practitioners to fully realise the potential impact of their activities towards the Horizon Europe EU Missions. This support will be tailored to all different types of citizen science, and the different stakeholders that are involved and participation taken.

THE MICS project brings together a transdisciplinary team to address a scientific and policy priority area where citizen science has the potential to promote a paradigm shift. Nature-based solutions (NBSs) are actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems that address societal challenges and provide human well-being. NBSs have increasingly become policy and planning objectives, but major knowledge gaps in NBSs science have hindered their implementation and acceptance. This is largely due to a lack of locally specific information about the influence of: climate, location, condition and management on NBS function and impact. Furthermore, the sustainability of NBSs often depends on the perceptions and needs of stakeholders, including user groups, local communities, conservation bodies, farmers, land managers, policy makers and practitioners. Due to their systemic complexity and embedding in local context, NBSs offer a unique potential for citizen science to make a major contribution. The MICS project will support NBS research by developing strategies and tools to evaluate impacts on science and society resulting from the integration of citizen science. These tools will foster citizen science approaches that increase both scientific knowledge, and how scientific evidence is taken up by communities and policy makers. MICS will use novel impact-assessment metrics and instruments that measure costs and benefits of citizen science in relation to the NBSs, with particular attention in the domains of society; democracy; the economy; NBS science, and citizen scientists. These instruments will be grounded in a comprehensive conceptual framework and integrated into an open platform following rigorous validation in key pilot sites along a West-East EU axis. This will test the applicability of the MICS impact-assessment tools in regions with differing opportunities and constraints for NBSs, and with different levels of citizen science uptake.

MONOCLE innovates and develops sensor, platform, and data handling technologies to increase coverage and lower the cost of in situ sensors in inland and coastal water bodies. These ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to direct anthropogenic impacts but of high economic importance and crucial to sustainable food, energy, and clean water supply. At the same time, these water bodies represent areas of the weakest performance in present EO capability to date. The MONOCLE system will reduce uncertainties in Earth Observation (EO) by characterising atmospheric and water optical properties. MONOCLE will deploy new and improved sensors on autonomous platforms (buoys, ships, drones), and further fill information gaps by developing low-cost complementary solutions for citizen scientists. This will provide essential reference observations needed to further improve and grow EO-based water quality services. MONOCLE will be requirement-driven and implemented by sensor and platform developers, sensor-data infrastructure experts, and EO scientists. A service-oriented data storage, processing, and visualisation infrastructure based on open data standards will integrate MONOCLE seamlessly with existing platforms. This also allows MONOCLE to build sensor performance traceability into its core to support synergistic sensor use and data inspection to identify sensor drift and episodic events. MONOCLE will demonstrate the added value of EO and water quality oriented sensor network to Copernicus EO services, GEOSS data brokering and GEO capacity building initiatives through a number of validation campaigns and use cases, including data-poor regions where no similar infrastructure yet exists. It is expected that the evolution of system standards, new sensors and innovative use of observation platforms of MONOCLE will foster innovation and commercial opportunities for the EO commercial sector and its downstream users in domains ranging from public health to energy and food security.

Citizen Science is a rapidly expanding and diversifying field of innovation with significant implications for, and potential benefits to, society, policy, and various academic research areas. This heterogeneity leads currently to a fragmented and not fully coordinated European Citizen Science landscape. The ambition of EU-Citizen.Science is to build, fill, and promote a sustainable platform and mutual learning space providing different tools, best practice examples and relevant scientific outcomes that are collected, curated, and made accessible to different stakeholders, ranging from interested citizens over scientific institutions up to politicians and public media in order to mainstream Citizen Science in Europe. This breakthrough will be pursued through three interconnected lines of activity: (i) coordination of citizen science actions and leveraging of existing resources in the presently fragmented landscape of Citizen Science in Europe, (ii) engagement of quadruple helix stakeholders at all levels (local, national and European), and (iii) creation of a mutual learning space and a set of comprehensive co-designed training modules for the different target audiences. Moreover, following a transparent, open and inclusive approach, EU-Citizen.Science will promote interdisciplinary, cross-border, cross-sector collaboration, and give rise to significant social innovation and new business models through the creation of new partnerships and the provision of novel sustainability-supporting tools. The EU.Citizen.Science project involves 14 partners and 9 third parties, representing 14 European Member States and a variety of stakeholders ranging from universities, NGOs, local authorities, CSOs and natural history museums, along with several other project supporters. Many of the partners are already engaged in other SwafS projects related to RRI, co-creation and citizen science, as well as numerous initiatives at national or local level.

Ground Truth 2.0 delivers the demonstration and validation of six scaled up citizen observatories in real operational conditions both in the EU and in Africa. It will strengthen the full feedback-loop in the information chain from citizen-based data collection to knowledge sharing for joint decision-making and cooperative planning. The project focuses on environmental indicators in urban and rural areas related to spatial planning issues, with a specific focus on flora and fauna as well as water availability and water quality for land and natural resources management. This is supported by an innovative web-based service for worldwide mapping and updating of land use. The overall objectives of Ground Truth 2.0 are to implement sustainable citizen observatories for the demonstration of their societal and economic benefits, and the global market uptake of the Ground Truth 2.0 concept and enabling technologies. The trans-disciplinary Ground Truth 2.0 approach consists of a multi-actor innovation process to combine the social dimensions of citizen observatories with enabling technologies so that their customisation and deployment is tailored to the envisaged societal and economic impacts of the observatories. The demonstration cases (4 EU and 2 African) cover the full 'spectrum’ of citizen-sensed data usage and citizen engagement, and therefore allow testing and validating of the concept and technologies, and evaluation of their impacts under a range of conditions. The Ground Truth 2.0 consortium presents a good mix of industry, SME, NGO, government, research and academia to ensure the roll out and uptake of the observatories. Ground Truth 2.0 is coordinating and interacting with other relevant initiatives, such as GEOSS, INSPIRE as well as the sister projects funded under the same call (namely GROW, SCENT and LANDSENSE) to create mutual synergies.