New Citizen Science App Feature: Spot Statistics

A new feature is ready for use by all Citizen Science projects running on the SPOTTERON platform: Spot Statistics. The observation of change over time plays an important role in many Citizen Science projects, from hydrology, land coverage or phenology. In the CitSci project "Crowdwater", running on SPOTTERON, Citizen Scientist observe the change of water levels in streams and rivers. As an extension to the Citizen Science smartphone apps, we just released a new feature which introduces a new statistic panel in the detail view of a spot.

As a data visualization tool for both Citizen Scientists and Project Scientists, the new statistic panel offers a chart which displays an attribute of the observation over time. Building on the Update Spot functionality, this new panel also acts like a data diary of your own observations.

We develop all the extensions in SPOTTERON with openess in mind, making it possible that other Citizen Science projects can adopt the feature if needed. By creating a meta system in the background, which enables the additon of numerical values to all input fields or buttons the apps, we can now visualize all kind of data directly in the CitSci Apps. For example, different growth phases of plants can have different values, starting low in spring, growing in summer and declining again in winter. This will generate a bell-like curve, visualizing the phenological development of the plant during the year.

The new statistic panels can already by viewed in the Crowdwater Citizen Science Apps for Android and iOS at www.crowdwater.ch.