This open and collaborative gamma radiation network demonstrates that citizen science can generate thousands of rigorous, reusable scientific data points on a national scale.
The project, driven by the Nuclear Safety Council and Fundación Ibercivis, consolidates an open data infrastructure that will remain active and public.
Openred comes to an end with a citizen network operating throughout Spain. Over two years, the project has combined various participatory activities, citizen training in radiological protection, and an openly accessible digital platform to build the country’s largest collaborative record of environmental gamma radiation.
What Openred has built in two years
The starting point was instrumental rigor. Before distributing the devices, five detectors were evaluated at the Institute of Energy Technologies of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (INTE-UPC) through five laboratory phases. The selected model, the RadiaCode 102 — with a CsI(Tl) scintillator crystal and spectrometric capability — has been taken by the Openred project to different points across Spanish territory. More than 300 participants have taken measurements using this device.
Building on that instrumental foundation, the network grew through various lines of action. Three hackathons held in Madrid, Zaragoza and Santander, together with participants from Bilbao, brought together 138 people — students, engineers, makers and professionals — to develop hardware, connectivity and data visualization solutions. The winning proposal in Madrid, from the TTN-Moratalaz team, integrates the detectors into The Things Network via LoRa, WiFi and 4G, and is now part of the project’s infrastructure.
In parallel, measurement campaigns have reached various areas of Spain, such as the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Valencia, Salamanca, Badajoz, Melilla, the Moncayo and the GR11, with more than 392 participants measuring their environment with the support of local universities and laboratories acting as ambassadors — including the Universitat de les Illes Balears and the Universidad de La Laguna. In all cases, the data confirmed the environmental normality of the areas measured.
Additionally, more than 20 educational centers, ranging from vocational training programs to master’s degree programs, have incorporated Openred into their classrooms through a teaching unit developed by the project, as well as through training and measurement campaigns. That student data was incorporated into the same public platform via the website or the app (iOS and Android).
The infrastructure continues
The closing of the project does not mean the end of the network. The platform map.open-red.es will remain active and will continue to receive new measurements through the mobile app, available for Android and iOS. Anyone interested in gamma radiation who has a Radiacode 102 device can contribute their data to the collaborative map. In addition, the more than 280,000 georeferenced records are openly available for use in research, education or science outreach.
About Openred
Openred is a citizen science project whose objective is to create an open and collaborative map of environmental gamma radiation levels in Spain, while also promoting citizen culture in radiological protection.
Openred enables citizens to generate scientifically valuable data under a rigorous methodology, favoring the democratization of science — not only in access to it but also in the generation of knowledge.
Openred is an initiative driven by the Nuclear Safety Council (CSN) and Fundación Ibercivis, in collaboration with experts from the Centre for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research (CIEMAT), the University of Zaragoza, the University of Cantabria and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.