Environmental Intelligence @ Exeter Research Network Seminar

Abstract: Chile is a country with very extreme climates, from deserts in the north to the harsh climate of Patagonia in the south and with the Andes mountain range covering 4300 km from the north to the south of the country, which creates a natural border with neighbouring countries and with the Pacific ocean to the west of the country.

Environmental monitoring (river water quality, air quality, soil pollution detection, biodiversity surveying, to name a few) are carried out by the state or sourced out to external consultants. In fact, baseline environmental surveys are only carried out when a new construction has been proposed, meaning that it has been hard to assess the changing “state of the environment” across Chile. Given the size of the country it is hard to monitor in enough places nor at a useful frequency. The data is not always publicly available or there is a large delay in uploading it, so many communities have decided to start their own monitoring projects. Citizen science can be a useful tool for educating communities about their natural environment and how it can be put at risk through human activities and it can mean that they see the data first hand and can use it to alert authorities about a problem and demand more monitoring or action to protect their environment.

In this talk Zoё Fleming will talk about a few citizen science projects that she has been involved with recently in Chile, measuring air quality in the south of the country and in an industrial zone and a participatory river monitoring project (Voluntarios por el Agua) that has been measuring monthly for nearly 4 years. We will discuss how these have changed, activated and inspired communities and given them a voice that the authorities are starting to listen to and how useful it is for researchers to work with these communities to gather, interpret and share this data.