CSMON-LIFE: data from the people, data for the people.

CSMON-LIFE (LIFE13 ENV/IT/842) is a 42 months long project (2014-2017) co-funded by the European Commission in the framework of the LIFE+ programme. CSMON-LIFE aims at raisinging the awareness on the potential contribution of citizen science in Italy, at increasinging cooperation among citizens, scientists and decision makers in collecting and elaborating biodiversity data, and at promoting new and more effective environmental policies. To achieve its goals, the project relies on both extensive awareness raising initiatives and on the use of modern mobile technologies. An app (for iOS and Android mobile OSs) and a webapp were developed at the start of the project and are being continually improved on the base of suggestions by collaborating scientists and citizens.. These tools allow citizens to take geo-referenced images of several target species (ca.120, related to several environmental issues), and to send them to a web management system for scientific data. The observations are seen through a validation interface, which is accessible to experts (since the start of the project), and to a selected group of citizen scientists (from spring 2016). The community driven validation is always confirmed byscientists and requires a general consensus. Once a validation (positive or negative) occurs, a feedback is sent to the observer. Scientifically validated data are then aggregated in the Italian National Biodiversity Network, using the BioCASE protocol and the ABCD data schema. All technologies are available to be used by anybody in the framework of CSMON-LIFE, and will be released under a CC license at the end of the project.