The high altitude balloon rose to 33,933 metres with several capsules on board, and the flight went off without incident.

The launch took place at the municipal sports hall in Lumpiaque, chosen after analysing the weather forecasts. Participants, families and neighbours gathered there to watch the capsules being prepared, the balloon inflated and then released towards the stratosphere. At around 12:20 local time the balloon lifted off and climbed for 83 minutes at about 6.5 m/s to its maximum altitude, 33,933 metres. At that height the balloon burst, as usual, and the capsules came down by parachute and landed near Chiprana (Zaragoza), about 103 km in a straight line from the launch site.

Servet XII flew several capsules carrying experiments designed by schools and by the project team. A tracking system made it possible to locate them after landing and recover the equipment to analyse the data they had collected.

Live tracking with LoRa and SSDV

One of the capsules carried a LoRa radio transmitter with GPS that sent its position and altitude every 30 seconds, plus test images using SSDV, a format for sending photos over radio in small packets. Two ground receivers listened to the balloon and posted what they heard to a public Telegram channel, so anyone could follow the flight live from a phone. Telemetry arrived throughout the flight, even with the balloon at 34 km altitude and more than 50 km from the receiver, and three complete images and several nearly complete ones were received.

The flight at a glance

• Launch: sports hall in Lumpiaque (Zaragoza), 25 October 2026.
• Maximum altitude: 33,933 metres.
• Landing: near Chiprana (Zaragoza), a little over two hours after lift-off.
• Distance travelled: about 119 km over the ground.

All the details, photos, the lift-off video, the 3D map and the technical report of the flight are on the Servet XII page.

Cover photo: Alejandro Suarez and Adolfo Amella.

The #SERVET project is a citizen science activity in the stratosphere organised by the I3A (University Research Institute for Engineering in Aragón) of the University of Zaragoza and the Ibercivis Foundation, with funding from the Government of Aragón and the collaboration of Teconecta. We thank the Lumpiaque Town Council for providing the venue and promoting the event.

La entrada Servet XII reaches 33,933 metres: high altitude balloon launch from Lumpiaque (Zaragoza, Spain) se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.

The consortium of the European LIFE-NITRAZENS project held its ordinary General Assembly, corresponding to Month 14 of the project, hosted by the Fundación Patrimonio Natural de Castilla y León (FPNCyL) and coordinated by the University of Burgos (UBU). Representatives of the 11 partner organisations from Spain and Portugal, including the Ibercivis Foundation, met to assess the milestones reached after the first water sampling campaign and to coordinate the next steps in the fight against nitrate pollution.

Ibercivis, leading communication and citizen engagement (WP7)

As leader of the Communication and Dissemination work package (WP7), the Ibercivis Foundation presented the indicators for the first 14 months of the project:

• Over 8,400 visits to the project website (life-nitrazens.eu), more than 84% of the target set for the whole three-year project.
• 48 appearances in national and local media in Spain and Portugal.
• A consolidated community network: Ibercivis has created and runs active WhatsApp communities in the pilot areas to coordinate volunteers and ambassadors in real time.

Closing Campaign 1: from citizen collection to analytical validation

One of the main topics of the assembly was the evaluation of the first water sample collection campaign, carried out with citizens, local ambassadors and node managers in the pilot areas of the Duero and Ebro basins. The University of Burgos and CITA Aragón presented the sampling protocol, supported by the Geonity App, and its path to the laboratories, which ensures scientific accuracy and traceability. These results will feed the first official campaign report (Deliverable D2.5).

Open data, good agricultural practices and replicability

• Governance Data Platform (WP3): OSOIGO showed progress on the interactive web platform that will let the public map and consult validated data on the quality of groundwater, springs and the supply network. Innovalia presented the federated data space, which will prevent nitrate information from remaining isolated in silos and will enable secure, interoperable and transparent exchange.
• Good Agricultural Practices and Awareness (WP4 and WP5): CITA Aragón and FPNCyL presented the design of participatory workshops on sustainable soil nutrition for farmers and irrigation communities, as well as educational initiatives in schools to promote efficient fertiliser use.
• Replicability and sustainability (WP6): the University of Coimbra, Águas do Centro Litoral, the Municipality of Soure and ABOFHBM highlighted the excellent reception of the citizen science protocols in the Mondego basin. This cross-border deployment lays the foundations for the replicability plan and the After-LIFE Plan, coordinated by UC and UBU.

Next steps: returning results and Campaign 2

• Online accountability events to return the nitrate data to Campaign 1 volunteers: 28 October for the Ebro basin and 10 November for the Duero basin.
• Launch of Campaign 2: preparing the kits and logistics for the second major sampling call, between autumn and winter.
• First Policy Brief: transferring the scientific evidence to river basin authorities and the competent public administrations.

“The strong involvement of local communities in this first campaign shows that citizen science is an indispensable tool for improving transparency and water governance in the European Union.”

Join Campaign 2

At Ibercivis we continue to support the network of volunteers and ambassadors. If you want to know what water flows from your tap, well or river, join as a volunteer or ambassador and we will assign you to your nearest Node.

You can read the original news on the Life-Nitrazens website (in Spanish). Life-Nitrazens is funded by the European Union (project ID 101215633).

La entrada Ibercivis at the Valladolid Assembly: Life-Nitrazens takes stock of its first citizen science campaign and sets the 2027 roadmap se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.

The event brought together around 500 people from 35 countries, a few days after the EOSC Federation officially went into production.

Citizen science produces data, methods and services that matter to European research, but digital research infrastructures have been built with universities and research centres in mind. People who take part in a project without belonging to an academic institution find it hard to access them. That is what we went to Florence to talk about.

What EOSC is

EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud, is not a single cloud or one large data centre. It is a federation of nodes, run by institutions and communities, that share data, tools and scientific services under common rules. Gianluigi Consoli (Italy) summed it up during the Symposium in one sentence, “EOSC does not replace our research infrastructures. It connects them.”

The EOSC Federation has just officially gone into production. There are already 14 nodes in production offering 124 scientific services, and 28 nodes are in production or on their way. The second wave of node coordinators was also presented in Florence. As we announced, the Symposium is the annual meeting of the EOSC community, and this year it took place from 14 to 16 October at the Palazzo dei Congressi.

The presentation

In the session “EOSC and ERICs/ESFRIs”, Fermín Serrano, RIECS-Concept Coordinator, gave the talk “Citizen science as an emerging RI community: participatory governance and EOSC as a long-term institutional anchor”. He prepared it with Francisco Sanz, EOSC-CSN Coordinator, who was also in Florence.

The talk applied the ESFRI and EOSC models to citizen science. We propose a pan-European, long-term, public and federated capacity that provides resources and services to all citizen science actors in all domains. In it, citizen scientists are at the same time users, providers of resources and data, and part of the governance. That is why they can bring new users, new data and new services to the EOSC Federation, and why EOSC can be a long-term institutional anchor for citizen science.

We want excellence to be possible without erasing local or domain-specific strengths, citizen science to be recognised as a strategic and horizontal capacity in the European Research Area, decisions to be supported by high-quality, trusted citizen-generated data, and existing capacities to be connected and easier to reuse and sustain.

The work so far

RIECS-Concept (Horizon Europe, grant agreement No 101188210), which we coordinate at Ibercivis, is preparing a future pan-European research infrastructure for excellent citizen science. In the first phase, up to July 2026, we gathered the needs of citizen science communities through around 50 engagement activities and published the first RIECS catalogue. In the second phase, where we are now, we are repeating the exercise with other communities, including other research infrastructures, to analyse and prioritise. The technical feasibility study and the strategic plan are due in December 2027, and the aim is to apply to the ESFRI Roadmap in 2030 with the commitment of six to eight countries.

So far we have reviewed more than 700 papers and more than 4,400 technologies, and held 51 activities with more than 500 participants from more than ten countries and regions. This work has produced 823 user stories, 37 needs, 31 technical requirements, 151 catalogue components and 1,980 services, resources and functionalities.

Alongside it, EOSC-CSN (EOSC Citizen Science Node), a six-month project funded by EOSC Gravity that we coordinate with CIEMAT, Citizen Science Italia and Leiden University, on behalf of Citizen Science Nederland, has drawn up the Project Charter for a thematic citizen science node in the EOSC Federation, covering its governance, technical architecture and operational framework. EOSC Gravity has already validated it. In the model we presented in Florence, RIECS and EOSC-CSN form an intermediate layer between users, the citizen science ecosystem, and EOSC together with the research infrastructures.

Four use cases

The talk ended with four possible use cases, which we propose to design and pilot together with other research infrastructures and EOSC nodes.

• A research team launches a citizen science project in RIECS, which provides proven methods, tools and guidance and connects the project to EOSC resources.
• An existing citizen science project wants to make its data available through EOSC. RIECS validates the metadata, assesses readiness and makes the dataset discoverable in the EOSC Federation.
• Another research infrastructure needs citizen participation. RIECS provides citizen science services such as ethics, recruitment and participation, while the infrastructure keeps responsibility for the campaign and its data.
• A person with no institutional affiliation wants to use EOSC resources. They sign in to RIECS with an external identity and recognised citizen science organisations vouch for them. RIECS manages roles, and EOSC providers make the final access decisions.

The panel

After the talks, Fermín joined the session panel with Antje Keppler (EOSC Association and Euro-BioImaging ERIC), Marcus Povey (Instruct-ERIC), Özlem Yalçın Seyhan (KUTTAM, Koç University) and Vojtěch Bystrý (CEITEC MU). The discussion covered what it takes to become an EOSC node, where to focus effort in the Federation’s second year, and how new communities can join without creating unfunded expectations.

Our view is that citizen science is well placed to contribute capabilities and governance step by step, although the operational commitments the Federation requires are hard to meet for small organisations that rely mostly on project funding. To make EOSC usable for people without an institutional affiliation, we propose a federated trust model, in which trusted organisations verify the identity and affiliation of contributors close to their community, and that verification is recognised across the Federation, in a similar way to how eduGAIN works in academia.

We also believe we should build what is missing and federate what already works, rather than add more fragmentation. Fermín often compares it with high-performance computing thirty years ago, when many groups had their own computing resources, which gradually became part of coordinated national and European infrastructures such as PRACE.

We were not the only citizen science voice at the Symposium. In the EOSC Federation User Forum (“EOSC Federation User Forum: The voice of the research community”), Stephen Serjeant of the Open University spoke about citizen science communities.

More information is available on the RIECS-Concept and EOSC-CSN websites and in the official summary of the EOSC Symposium 2026.

La entrada Bringing citizen science to the EOSC Symposium 2026 in Florence se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.

Ibercivis is one of the project partners and took part online in the kick-off meeting, held in Salamanca on 29 and 30 September.

OSIRIS-EU (Open Science inspiring Inclusive Research and Innovation towards Societal Impact in Europe) is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchanges project under Horizon Europe, funded by the European Union with €1,087,170 and coordinated by the University of Salamanca. Over the next four years it will work to transform the way scientific knowledge is produced, shared and assessed.

The kick-off meeting took place at the Centro Internacional del Español in Salamanca. The University of Salamanca’s Vice-Rector for Research, José Miguel Mateos Roco, and Nicoletta Petre, Project Officer at the European Research Executive Agency (REA), welcomed representatives of the 27 institutions in the consortium. Over the two days, the partners agreed a shared roadmap and launched the first staff exchanges.

From Open Science to impact

OSIRIS-EU starts from one idea: opening up science is not just about making its results easier to access, but also about doing better science, more collaborative, transparent and connected with society. Opening up data, methods and results is only the beginning. Real impact also depends on reproducibility, responsible assessment, inclusion, public participation, ethics and trust in science.

That is why staff exchanges are at the heart of the project. Researchers, technical staff and other professionals will spend time at other institutions to share practices, compare ways of doing science and bring what they learn back to their own organisations. The aim is for these exchanges to build a lasting network of cooperation across institutions, disciplines and sectors that keeps working once the project ends.

A network of 27 institutions

The consortium includes universities, research centres, scientific organisations, international infrastructures and companies working in technology, education and research assessment. Among them are the University of Edinburgh, KU Leuven, the University of Vienna, Yonsei University (South Korea), King’s College London, CERN, the Institut Pasteur, Fundación CARTIF, OAPEN, Arduino, Coursera, Altmetric and Clarivate. Ibercivis is part of this network as a partner. This variety makes it possible to connect research, technology, education, open access, research assessment, citizen science and innovation within a single network.

The role of Ibercivis

As a project partner, Ibercivis brings its experience in citizen science and participatory open science. We are part of the work package on societal engagement and citizen science, where we lead the task on citizen science pilots: we will connect researchers, policymakers and citizens so that inclusiveness, equality and co-creation reach the whole consortium.

In these pilots, members of the public will be able to co-create data, validate research results or help monitor the societal impact of the project. The whole process will be documented openly in the OSIRIS-EU Digital Hub.

You can follow the project on its website: osiriseu.com.

Adapted from the original news story by the University of Salamanca (in Spanish): ‘La USAL lidera una red internacional de instituciones para transformar la Ciencia Abierta en impacto social’.

La entrada OSIRIS-EU gets under way: the European project in which Ibercivis is a partner to turn Open Science into societal impact se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.

About the project

Openred – Light pollution (light pollution) takes the Openred open data platform, originally created to measure environmental gamma radiation, and applies it to measuring artificial light at night. Members of the public walk through streets, parks and riverbanks with light meters and share their measurements on an open map.

It is Ibercivis’s own initiative, funded through the European project PLAN-B, which studies how to reduce the effects of artificial light at night on biodiversity. Ibercivis leads PLAN-B task 6.3.

Each light meter connects via Bluetooth to the Openred app, which links every light reading to the phone’s GPS position in real time. At the end of the walk, the data are uploaded automatically to map.open-red.es, where they build heat maps and profiles that can be compared with high-resolution night-time satellite images (SDGSAT layer).

Project objectives

• Measure light pollution at ground level, to complement satellite images and fixed stations.
• Identify the ‘dark corridors’ worth protecting and the areas where excess light affects nocturnal wildlife and human wellbeing.
• Keep all data open for research, policy-makers and civil society.
• Build local communities of practice able to organise their own measurement campaigns.

The role of Ibercivis

Ibercivis has developed the Openred platform and its measurement app, coordinates the campaigns and leads the community of practice in Zaragoza, one of the PLAN-B pilot areas alongside Gdańsk, Leipzig and Belo Horizonte.

Our activities

• Campaigns with around 30 high-precision portable light meters, on guided night walks from city centres out to parks and natural areas.
• Launch of the Zaragoza community of practice with the Agrupación Astronómica Aragonesa (September 2026).
• Measurements in Zaragoza, Madrid and Granada and in cities in Finland, Poland and Austria: 17,000 measurements recorded as of October 2026.
• Manuals and protocols so that local groups can organise their own campaigns, with materials from Citizen Observers and Cities at Night.

Would you like to join the next night walks in Zaragoza? Email dlisbona[at]ibercivis.es.

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Project details

Type of project

European

Duration

Since 2025

Funding

European project PLAN-B (Horizon Europe, grant agreement No 101135308), in which Ibercivis leads task 6.3

Area

Environmental monitoring

Project website

La entrada Openred – Light pollution: Measure artificial light at night at street level with the public and share it on an open map se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.

About the project

The Observatory of Citizen Science in Spain is the portal Ibercivis has run since 2016 to show who is doing what in citizen science in Spain. Over these ten years it has built a national network of initiatives, projects, resources, researchers, institutions and participants.

It works as a map and catalogue of projects, a repository of resources and a place to see and be seen. Anyone running an initiative can add it, control the information shown about it and check statistics and metrics to manage it better.

On 15 July 2026 it celebrated its 10th anniversary in the Paraninfo of the University of Zaragoza and presented its new platform, integrated with the European platform citizenscience.eu. The event also announced the 1st Congress of Citizen Science in Spain, planned for 2027.

Project objectives

• Give citizen science projects visibility to increase participation in them.
• Make coordination and synergies between projects easier.
• Share resources and results across all areas of citizen science.
• Develop specific indicators to analyse how the relationship between science and society is evolving.

The role of Ibercivis

Ibercivis runs the Observatory and has developed its platform, which other organisations have already adopted: the European, Italian and Dutch citizen science associations and UNESCO. It is coordinated by Maite Pelacho.

Our activities

• Map and catalogue of citizen science projects and initiatives in Spain, open to new additions.
• Workshops and events to promote citizen science, such as the one at Medialab-Prado to co-create a national agenda (November 2016).
• 10th anniversary event and launch of the new platform (University of Zaragoza, 15 July 2026).

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Project details

Type of project

National

Duration

Since 2016

Funding

Originally, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT)

Area

Citizen science infrastructure

Project website

La entrada Observatory of Citizen Science in Spain: The meeting point for citizen science projects, resources and people in Spain se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.

About the project

Geonity is a free citizen science platform from Fundación Ibercivis for researchers, organisations and communities. It lets you design data collection projects, gather real-world observations from any device and collaborate in six languages.

It is open to any person or organisation: research groups, universities, public authorities, associations, schools or local initiatives that want to launch a project, and volunteers who want to contribute observations. No programming skills are needed and it is free to use.

Project objectives

• Provide a shared environment so that very different groups can organise their data collection without having to build a custom tool each time.
• Make it easy to take part in the field, through the website and mobile apps.
• Protect participants with privacy and location controls.

The role of Ibercivis

Ibercivis has developed Geonity with its own funds, and maintains and improves it based on real-world use and feedback from the community. Projects such as Life-Nitrazens and Flood2Now use it for their measurement campaigns.

Our activities

• Works in three steps: create a project (topic, geographical area and form), contribute geolocated observations, and analyse and export the data as CSV.
• New version (May 2026): custom forms with text, numbers, photos or options; organisations and teams with roles; public or private projects with location blurring; interface in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, French and German.
• Apps for Android and iOS.

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Project details

Type of project

National

Duration

Ongoing

Funding

Fundación Ibercivis’s own funds

Area

Citizen science infrastructure

Project website

La entrada Geonity: A free platform for creating and taking part in citizen science projects se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.

About the project

Lost at Night is a citizen science platform for georeferencing night-time photographs of Earth taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The photos come from NASA’s archive (the Astronaut Photography of Earth Database). They arrive with plenty of information (camera, focal length, expedition, the Station’s position) but without their exact footprint on the ground. To use them as scientific data, each photo has to be aligned with its geographical coordinates, so that every pixel matches a point on the planet.

Volunteers mark the same feature (a coastline, a river, a lit-up town) in the photo and on the map. Each pair is a control point: at least three are needed, and seven well-spread points are recommended. Each image is georeferenced independently by several people to validate the result.

Lost at Night was born within Cities at Night, the project coordinated by researcher Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel. Since 2024, Ibercivis’s development and maintenance of the platform has been funded by the European project PLAN-B.

Project history

• 2010-2011. Astronaut Soichi Noguchi posts night-time photos taken from the ISS on social media. Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel and Jaime Zamorano see their scientific value and propose calibrating them to NASA, but the images have no location: this is how the idea of Cities at Night is born.
• First apps. With volunteers from the MediaLab Prado hackathon and the Citizen Science Summit in London, the first apps for classifying and locating the photos are created; Lost at Night is the one for placing them on the map.
• 2018. A crowdfunding campaign to design and maintain the Cities at Night apps, promoted by Ibercivis.
• 2019. Lost at Night is up and running at lostatnight.org.
• 2020. A new version of the app, thanks to the Stars4all campaign, support from FECYT and the involvement of Ibercivis, which also publishes a teaching unit for secondary schools (see the page for that stage).
• 2024. Ibercivis develops the current platform, with georeferencing by control points, challenges and teams, as part of PLAN-B.

Project objectives

To build, with the help of the public, a global map of Earth’s night-time lights to measure light pollution and track how it changes.

• Georeference the ISS night-time photographs with precise geographical coordinates.
• Create a global database of night-time light patterns.
• Support studies on the impact of artificial light on ecosystems and human health.
• Publish the validated data openly (CC BY-SA licence) for research.

The role of Ibercivis

Ibercivis is a member of the PLAN-B consortium. It has developed the Lost at Night platform and keeps it running, and organises workshops and activities so that more people can take part.

Our activities

• Development and maintenance of the platform, with regional challenges (Spain, Europe, France, Poland and Brazil 2026-27) and teams so that classes, clubs or groups of friends can take part together. The georeferencing code is open source (gdalface on GitHub).
• PLAN-B online workshop (21 May 2026): around fifty people placed 2,500 control points in a single session, 80% of the 3,000 target.
• Workshops with secondary schools in Melilla (April 2026), together with Openred and ECHO.
• Open day at ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Villanueva de la Cañada (3 October 2026): visitors of all ages georeferenced ISS photos.

As of 18 October 2026, the community had placed 36,859 control points and georeferenced 2,003 photographs, with 146 participants.

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Project details

Type of project

European

Duration

Since 2019 (current platform since 2024)

Funding

Since 2024, Ibercivis’s work has been funded by the European project PLAN-B (Horizon Europe, grant agreement No 101135308)

Research

Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel

Area

Space

Project website

La entrada Lost at Night: Locate night-time photos of Earth taken from the International Space Station on a map se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.

La entrada Science in your Mobile: A multi-game mobile app to bring science closer to young people se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.

La entrada OpenReq: An intelligent system for gathering and prioritising software requirements with the community, applied to citizen science se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.