Soil moisture sensors were developed by citizen science collective Meet je Stad (Measure your City). Measure your City was started in 2015 by inhabitants of the City of Amersfoort, with the goal of measuring climate related indicators. To be able to do so, collaboration was sought with the City of Amersfoort, the local Water Authority and the University of Applied Sciences of Amsterdam. For the first three years the initiative focused on measuring temperature and humidity. Importantly, citizens develop their own research questions, analyze the data together with professionals and discuss potential implications. By doing so, the collective uses citizen science to spread knowledge on both technology
and climate change in the most grass-roots manner possible.
Within the SCOREwater project, Measure your City was asked to expand measurements with soil moisture measurements and additional temperature and humidity sensors.
An important note here is that Measure your City develops their own sensors, has developed their own data platform and uses its own gateways purchased from the Things Network. As a result, much effort is put into constructing sensors that are reliable, low-maintenance and accurate. The latter is important
for the City of Amersfoort as well, which intends to not only work on shared knowledge and understanding, but also use the data for policy making. To do so the data has to be reliable. By deploying both these sensors and purchasing company-built sensors, we can compare the data to assess how reliable the Measure your City sensors are. This is part of the next stage of the project, and results will used to further develop the citizen science sensors.
About Meet je Stad (Measure your City)
Measure your City is a citizen science initiative. The process of science does not take place at a university with buildings, professors and a rat race just to get something published, but simply with people like you.
Anyone who is curious and wants to find out things will find a nice place at Measure your City. That can be anything: finding out how a certain sensor works, how to make a graph from measurement data, what the influence of climate is on... you name it.
