Social media for data acquisition, management, and visualization
Organizations with missions to protect, enhance, or restore watersheds have taken up noble, albeit difficult, causes. Thank you. The threats are numerous. The implementation strategies are diverse. The wins are slow in coming. If there was one recipe for success for clean water and healthy watersheds we’d all be enacting the same programs, but no prescriptive solution exists.
What brings us together is our desire to improve our natural world. And to do so, we all are looking for the best tools available to support the programs we have in place. Organizations are all hitting the pavement, engaging volunteers and collecting as much relevant data as possible to improve our natural world. Do you have programs that use any of the following strategies to achieve your mission?
Citizen Science
You invest a lot of time to train volunteers to collect crucial water quality data. Their efforts are valuable but the process of coordinating the volunteers, collecting their reports, compiling the information and analyzing the results takes a lot of effort. And then there is no visual record of the monitoring site.
Volunteer Events
Your members head out to your events like hikes, stream cleanups, or educational tours of your projects. You track how many folks attend in a spreadsheet, post a photo of the event on social media and then the day passes. Attendees leave energized but they disengage until your next event without a call to action.
Community Group Projects
You organize citizen groups, K-12 classes, or other environmental organizations for special projects. You categorize the projects by creating visualizations and story maps of the work but these are hard or expensive to develop and keep current.
Policy and Advocacy
You collect information to share with your local or state government to influence policy, trigger remediation efforts, or address citizen concerns.
Pollution Reporting
You host a hotline or online reporting form where anyone can send you a tip about a pollution report. You have a long list of types of threats to your river that you’d love to collect and you require that the reporter includes a lot of very detailed information about what they saw and how to get to the site. But their nonspecific description leaves you hunting around a riverbank looking for a dead fish, eroded stream bank, or wading cows.
Love of your river and watershed
One of your members mentions that they had a rare wildlife sighting on your rivers, saw something amiss but didn’t know how to get in touch with your, had an incredible experience on the river, or gives you complicated directions to an incredible fishing spot. Photos you do collect you post on your website where they sit, without clear directions on how others can locate the same spot.
Collecting and keeping tabs on all of the information that informs your programs and mission is critical but sometimes feels like a Sisyphean task.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you’ve batted around the idea of creating a mobile app that you can use to engage with your members, collect information, and visually map data on your website. You’ve probably also discussed ways to manage all your data efficiently and collectively. You’re in luck — the app you’ve dreamt of creating exists and is ready for deployment in your watershed. Water Reporter is a platform for organizations and individuals to coordinate and document their water work, no matter where you’re located or what work you’re doing. And as you can see above, we’re already connecting with organizations to assist in collecting reports relevant to whatever program they want to engage with.
We have so much more to share about our platform. But first, take Water Reporter for a test drive. Sign up for a user account. Use the app as an excuse to go outdoors, submit a report. You can submit anything but if you need a prompt — go check out if a stormwater management project in your ‘hood is working. Feel free to add #firstpost to your comments section. Then check out your report on the community map and your profile.
After stretching your legs outside, visit our website to learn more about Water Reporter features or give us a shout at support@waterreporter.org. We’re ready to set up an organization accounts, walk you through how the system works, and share some not-so-secret tips about all the features that make Water Reporter the most accessible citizen science and volunteer reporting app for water health.
