Digitally enhanced community-based environmental monitoring: technologically upgrading the Enviro-Champs initiative

Conventional water resource governance and monitoring systems, while essential, are falling short of requirements to address urgent challenges and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Moreover, the global north and wealthy regions are typically overrepresented in science, while marginalised, disaffected and indigenous regions in developing countries, especially in the global south, remain underrepresented. Addressing these challenges requires diversified involvement that includes local community members who are disproportionately impacted by environmental and social problems.

In the late 2000s, the non-profit Duzi-uMngeni Conservation Trust (DUCT) helped establish the Enviro-Champs, a community-based citizen science-driven monitoring initiative, in the Mpophomeni and Shiyabizali townships in Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN), South Africa. The initiative offers a range of impressive and important social contributions, such as communicating flood risks across the community and monitoring of wastewater effluents, but knowledge co-creation and data collection via citizen science has always been at its core. Despite gradual technological progress within the data capture and reporting framework of the initiative, there has been a need for a digitally integrated system to assist with data capture, submission, collation, visualization, reporting, and feedback. Collaborating within the CGIAR Initiative on Digital Innovation, we aimed to address these issues to increase the power, impact, and scalability of the Enviro-Champs initiative.

Initially, we consolidated the knowledge from the community of practice that had formed around the Enviro-Champs and similar initiatives to synthesise a recruitment and training framework for the Enviro-Champs initiative. We then customised a version of the Open Data Kit (ODK) mobile data collection app, called ODK Collect, which submits data to Formshare1 , a CGIAR-based cloud-hosting infrastructure.

Here, we report on piloting the use of this system of ODK Collect for citizen science data collection, with Formshare for cloud-based data collation and storage, within the Mpophomeni Enviro-Champs initiative. As part of this pilot, we aimed to use an Excel macro-coded data cleaning process coupled with Microsoft Power BI2 dashboard for real-time, semi-automated data handling and visualisation. The pilot was undertaken in collaboration with the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) and uMngeni-uThukela Water (UUW) who are the managing authorities of the Mpophomeni Enviro-Champs initiative. This pilot showcases the process of codeveloping a digitally integrated system of data collection, curation, and reporting for the Enviro-Champs initiative, as a model method to co-develop and establish a community-based, collaborative, coordinated, and technologically integrated citizen science driven monitoring program in a rural and previously disadvantaged area.