Smartphones4water

SmartPhones4Water (S4W) is a non-profit organization focused on mobilizing young researchers and citizen scientists to quantitatively tell their water stories. Stories of too little, too much, or too dirty. Practically, this involves generating, managing, and understanding the hydro-meteorological data necessary to support wise water management decisions. S4W = young researchers + citizen scientists + mobile technology. S4W sees water data gaps as educational opportunities. S4W uses a smartphone-based data collection platform to collect data about water with citizen scientists led by young researchers. Advances in mobile technology (e.g, GPS, cameras, etc.) have drastically improved citizen science observations’ accuracy and reliability. In many cases, our approach is more cost-effective than traditional methods and more rapidly scalable. Citizen science has the benefit of building communities’ capacity to understand and manage their water resources, strengthening their connectedness to place. Involving young researchers builds their research capacities and ensures that the improved understanding is locally retained with the academic partner institutions. Data collected by S4W is freely and readily available to the public (https://data.smartphones4water.org) to encourage the next generation of water researchers and managers to rise to the water management challenges before them collaboratively.