EU-funded OTTERS Kicks off in Berlin
2 min readBERLIN, Germany — On September 7-8, the 12 consortium partners of the EU-funded OTTERS project, led by the American University of Armenia (AUA) Acopian Center for the Environment, held the project’s kick-off meeting in Germany. The European Citizen Science Association (ECSA), one of the project consortium partners, hosted the event at Berlin’s Natural History Museum.
OTTERS, the Societal Transformation for Marine and Freshwater Stewardship through Scaling Up Citizen Science, is a 2.5 year project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe program.
The meeting allowed project partners to share visions and ideas for the implementation of OTTERS, learn about the European Commission’s expectations of the project, and begin the process of setting goals for this ambitious undertaking.
Part of the second day was devoted to a workshop on “The-State-of-the-Art in Aquatic Citizen Science.” The presenters included both OTTERS partners as well as other researchers from Europe and the United States. Topics included the role of citizen science in the European Green Deal, co-creation of citizen science apps, tools to measure impact of citizen science, use of data mining on social media sites, creating global topic-specific citizen science networks, and more.
The one-million-euro OTTERS project includes partners from Armenia, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine. It will support the coordination of EU citizen science initiatives focused on water, aiming to accelerate the creation and adoption of technical, legal, and ethical standards for citizen science protocols and methods; examine the effectiveness of citizen science in societal transformation toward sustainable aquatic ecosystem stewardship; and pilot cross-community, watershed-based Spring-to-Sea Stewardship campaigns.
For more information on OTTERS, please visit https://ace.aua.am/projects/otters/ or http://ottersproject.com
The AUA Acopian Center for the Environment, a research center of the American University of Armenia (AUA), promotes the protection and restoration of the natural environment through research, education, and community outreach. The AUA Acopian Center’s focus areas include sustainable natural resource management, biodiversity protection and conservation, greening the built environment, sustainable energy, as well as information technology and the environment. Visit http://ace.aua.am.
