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Record W4412415181 · doi:10.3389/fenvs.2025.1609084

Citizen science in river monitoring: a systematic literature review of the whys and hows

2025· article· en· W4412415181 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueFrontiers in Environmental Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEarth and Planetary Sciences
TopicEnvironmental Monitoring and Data Management
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersLaidlaw Foundation
KeywordsEnvironmental scienceEngineering ethicsSociologyEnvironmental planningEnvironmental resource managementEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

River monitoring is a prevalent focus within citizen science projects. Despite numerous reports and institutional manuals detailing the monitoring techniques employed in individual projects, there is a notable lack of comprehensive academic research on the diverse methods and objectives utilized by citizen scientists in river monitoring. This study conducts a systematic literature review to clarify the specific objectives of these citizen science projects and the primary methods used to achieve each objective. We followed the PSALSAR methodology for systematic reviews in environmental science to assess information on global citizen science initiatives in river monitoring available in both published and grey literature. We ultimately reviewed 97 documents from three databases: Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Google. These documents revealed a dominant focus among river-based citizen science projects on objectives related to water quality and river ecosystem health. Methods were varied, and many common methods are routinely applied to multiple objectives. The study provides a framework that links the main objectives to the primary methods, serving as both a practical guide for new initiatives and a valuable index for academic research.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.049
Threshold uncertainty score0.749

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.004
GPT teacher head0.191
Teacher spread0.187 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it