This project will engage citizens new to cyberinfrastructure (CI) in the development of tools and data analysis; train computer science (CS) students to work with citizens, thereby transforming what they envision as possible roles and responsibilities in their future careers; and, provide lake data to the broader research, policy?]making, and educational communities, thereby broadening understanding of lake ecosystems by students, citizen scientists, and the lay community worldwide. By engaging citizens as full participants in a community committed to understanding and sharing information on lake processes, their involvement in the continued development and use of CI tools will be enhanced and sustained. The goal of this project is to bring a citizen scientist group (Lake Sunapee Protective Association) into the development and use of CI and, in the process, create and evaluate a model for engaging a broader citizen base in the articulation of needs, and the development and use of CI tools. This will be done by focusing on three objectives: (1) create CI with citizen scientists to present real?]time and archived lake buoy data to the lay public in accessible and useful forms, while simultaneously training and transferring skills to the lake association; (2) educate and train CS students to interact effectively with citizen scientists and lay communities to co-develop CI; and (3) develop a model that expands the reach and impact of CI and employ a method to assess its success. The project will also assess and document the suitability of products to K?]8 education. These objectives will be accomplished through a series of three workshops with increasingly wider participation regionally and nationally for citizen scientists and K?]8 educators. Between meetings, project students and researchers working with members of the lake association and their education staff will implement the desired functionality into a portal?]based system. Close linkages to the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON) will help ensure that the results are broadly disseminated worldwide.
Revolutions in hardware and software technology (aka cyberinfrastructure) have vastly increased our ability to acquire, transmit, and store environmental data. These revolutions are producing dramatic changes in environmental observing science, including the development and deployment of sensors (instruments that can record environmental conditions 24/7, 365 days/year) in a variety of locations and types of ecosystems. This project engaged the community of lake associations, starting with and building on strong collaborations with the Lake Sunapee Protective Association (LSPA). The LSPA, which has been in existence since the late 1800s, is an outreach and education organization dedicated to "enhancing the environment of the Lake Sunapee watershed and region. There are thousands of lake associations around the country. The overarching goal was to bring citizen scientist groups like the LSPA into the development and use of cyberinfrastructure (CI) and, in the process, create and evaluate a model for engaging a broader citizen base in the articulation of needs, and the development and use of CI tools. Our particular focus was to work with citizen scientists to develop a web-based user interface to view real-time sensor data collected by the LSPA Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON; www.gleon.org) monitoring buoy. This was accomplished by focusing on three objectives: (1) creating CI with citizen scientists to present real-time and archived lake buoy data to the lay public in accessible and useful forms, while simultaneously training and transferring skills to the lake association; (2) educating and training computer science (CS) students to interact effectively with citizen scientists and lay communities to co-develop CI; and (3) developing a model that expands the reach and impact of CI and employ a method to assess its success. In addition, a small supplement to the project resulted in the development of an "app" for android phones. This app, also co-developed, allows citizens, students and researchers to collect, store, and access data from lakes and watersheds. This "app" has generated significant interest and is currently being tested by Maine lake associations for use during the summer of 2012. In summary, during this CI-TEAM grant, we (ecologists, data managers, computer scientists, a social scientist, and members of a non-profit lake association) created and evaluated a model for engaging a broader citizen base to better articulate needs, development, and use of CI tools to share, display, and manipulate real-time lake sensor data. The data were recorded by an instrumented buoy deployed on Lake Sunapee, NH as part of the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON), which was an invaluable technical resource during the project. We created software that has been used by teachers, the citizen science group, and faculty for undergraduate classes to teach quantitative literacy as well as aquatic ecology. We engaged citizens in co-development. Citizens also participated in an international GLEON meeting in 2009, and co-hosted the 13th international GLEON meeting in Sunapee, NH in October 2013. This was the first GLEON meeting to be co-hosted by a lake association/citizen group and to have offered opportunities for public engagement and involvement with scientists. Throughout this project, we trained computer (CS) graduate students, high school students, an information science Ph.D. student, and a postdoctoral scholar.
