The European project Life-Nitrazens starts a series of citizen environmental monitoring missions to assess water quality in the Duero, Ebro, and Mondego basins.
Through the use of specific scientific kits and citizen science methodologies in which Ibercivis participates, volunteers from the Ebro and Duero river basins will collect rigorous data that will foster evidence-based water governance.
The excessive presence of nitrates in surface and groundwater constitutes one of the most complex ecological and health challenges in rural and agricultural environments. With the intention of comprehensively addressing this issue, the European project Life-Nitrazens has launched its measurement campaigns, an initiative that seeks to mitigate water pollution by promoting the sustainability of agricultural systems and the protection of river ecosystems.
The measurement campaigns directly call upon volunteer citizens to carry out water sampling, ambassadors to dynamicize and guide those who participate, and node leaders so that their entity, association, or city council can be a physical meeting point where volunteers collect their material and deliver samples. Registration to participate in the campaigns is done through a form hosted on the project’s own website.
Different ways to participate according to your level of involvement
The project offers its participants three ways to get involved:
- Ambassador: Ambassadors are the eyes and hands of the project on the ground, highly involved individuals or initiatives in charge of managing campaigns and participants in their area. Life-Nitrazens will provide them with everything necessary for this task—informative material, sample kits, support sessions, talks in the area about the project…—and they will be able to coordinate with participants through a WhatsApp community created for this purpose.
- Node: In each area, the project needs a physical space to store samples while respecting the cold chain, and a person responsible for sending them to the respective analysis laboratories in Zaragoza and Burgos. The person in charge of the node may or may not be an ambassador, or can coordinate with ambassadors and participants in the area to collect the samples and transfer them to the laboratory.
- Participant: Any person or entity involved with their territory who wants to know the health of their water and participate in a European project like Life-Nitrazens. In coordination with their ambassadors, participants will sample the water in their environment, either individually or in the collaborative campaigns that each ambassador organizes. Each participant will be responsible for taking their sample to their node and will receive constant information, advice, and the analysis results of their sample, as well as recognition from the project for their work.
Once the participation role in these campaigns has been decided, the sample collection protocol is as follows:
- Registration: Complete one of the registration forms according to your role (as ambassador/node or as participant) and join the WhatsApp Community of the corresponding area.
- Collection of the Measurement Kit: Go to the assigned reference node on the agreed day to collect a measurement kit that allows a first monitoring directly in the natural or consumption environment.
- Sampling: Visit the study areas to take water samples following the instructions in the guides provided by the project. The extraction points can be springs, wells, streams, or supply networks.
- Geolocation: Register the sample data on the Geonity citizen science platform to validate the exact geolocation in situ.
- Delivery to the node: Bring the sample to the node in less than 3 hours to avoid the degradation of the components and ensure the reliability of the nitrate data.
- Validation and Scientific Analysis: Check the results of the measurements on the project’s digital platform after the final laboratory analysis.
Thanks to citizen science, measurement campaigns not only multiply the volume of available data on a spatial scale that traditional science could hardly cover autonomously, but also boost environmental awareness among the population.
The Life-Nitrazens project
The objective of Life-Nitrazens is the creation of a centralized data repository and the development of Best Management Practices (BMPs) guides to optimize the use of fertilizers in the agrifood fabric. To achieve this, the initiative has a multidisciplinary consortium of entities: the scientific leadership and monitoring of the pilot areas fall upon leading academic and research institutions, such as the University of Burgos (project coordinator), the Centro de Investigación y Tecnología Agroalimentaria de Aragón (CITA), and the Universidade de Coimbra. Likewise, the project has the key support of public administrations and territorial entities such as the Junta de Castilla y León and the Município de Soure, along with agents from the water, technological, and agricultural sectors in charge of channeling training, water management, and digital solutions on farms, such as Águas do Centro Litoral, the Associação de Beneficiários do Baixo Mondego, the Comunidad General de Riegos del Alto Aragón, Osoigo, and Innovalia Association.
In this consortium, the Ibercivis Foundation assumes the responsibility of leading the communication and dissemination work package and coordinating citizen science methodologies together with the University of Burgos. Ibercivis provides its participatory infrastructure and its experience in environmental protection projects to ensure that the sample collection process by the non-specialized public meets the standards of rigor and scientific validation that public administrations and Hydrographic Confederations require for subsequent political decision-making.
Life-Nitrazens is funded by the LIFE program of the European Union under project ID 101215633.