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D6.3 Citizen-science toolbox and evidence hub (renamed as the Cos4Cloud Toolbox and Evidence Hub) has been developed as a legacy collection of different materials and resources. It will be a ‘one stop shop’ of Cos4Cloud best practice demonstrating project results, this is being collated within the following category themes: Training & capacity building resources: Cos4Cloud co-designed technological services Best practice guidelines & resources for COs: Citizen observatories working collaboratively Educational resources: Examples of citizen science school-based approaches Case studies: demonstrating Cos4Cloud success stories and best practice examples Evidence Hub: feedback, discussion threads / themes, participation and engagement activities The development of the Cos4Cloud Toolbox and Evidence Hub contributes to the delivery of Work Package 6 (WP6) Networking, (education), training and capacity building, led by the OU. This output contributed to creating and sharing best practice guidelines, training, capacity building and educational citizen science resources. The Cos4Cloud Toolbox & Evidence Hub was envisioned as a ‘one-stop-shop’ of Cos4Cloud best practice guidelines and materials for existing and future citizen observatory leaders incorporating case studies, training, capacity building and educational citizen science resources. The main goal of WP6 is to demonstrate new conceptual models for evidence-based knowledge exchange, capacity-building, best practice learning and engagement with and for citizen science, focusing on citizen observatories.

Cos4Cloud is developing thirteen technological services focused on boosting citizen science observatories to help increase and improve the quantity and quality of observations. The project includes the participation of 9 established citizen observatories (CO) and Do it Yourself (DIY) initiatives, focused on biodiversity and the environment, integrating and testing these services. Part of this also, are capacity building, training, educational, networking, dissemination, codesign, communication and engagement collaborative strategic actions and initiatives which also demonstrate Cos4Cloud best practice. Facilitating networking and citizen science knowledge management processes across organisations, people and initiatives is one of the key objectives of the Cos4Cloud project. Task 6.5 Training and Capacity building services, part of Work Package 6 (WP6) ‘Networking, Training [Education] and Capacity Building’, supports this. Task 6.5 focuses on actions and initiatives for training citizen observatories participants, managers / leaders, developers and other potential target groups and stakeholders about the use of Cos4Cloud services. The development and validation of user / administrator / system guides and handbooks for different services, shared via the Cos4Cloud Toolbox and Evidence Hub is included as part of this. This deliverable demonstrates the training materials and resources being developed to be made available online, as part of the Toolbox; outlines the capacity building framework guiding the development of these materials and reports on how they will be made accessible. This D6.6 Training materials and Capacity Building Report: Introduces capacity building and citizen science and proposes and approach of adapted to Cos4Cloud Summarises some of the research conducted which influences and defines the model and framework Includes an outline of other Cos4Cloud approaches and strategies supporting this Outlines the training and capacity building plan, supporting the Cos4Cloud services in particular, under implementation as part of the model devised for the Toolbox and Evidence Hub Includes summary examples of the training materials and resources developed supporting the Cos4Cloud services which will be live and accessible from the Cos4Cloud Toolbox and Evidence Hub before the end of the project; and Concludes with a summary of development and next steps for implementation and sustainability strategies supporting this which will help to build a legacy for Cos4Cloud in the citizen science landscape and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) beyond the lifetime of the project.

This deliverable, produced within Work Package 6 (WP6) Task 6.1, identifies 78 citizen science (CS), citizen observatory (CO) projects, CO portals and other initiatives of interest (past, current and future) that may either contribute to or make use of the Cos4Cloud platform and services. The goal was to identify a group of projects and initiatives that we might productively work with across the duration of Cos4Cloud, not to produce a comprehensive list of projects.

Background:\ud Hedges are oth ecologically and culturally important and are a distinctive feature of the British landscape. However the overall length of hedges across Great Britain is decreasing. Current challenges in studying hedges relate to the dominance of research on rural, as opposed to urban, hedges, and their variability and geographical breadth. To help address these challenges and to educate the public on the importance of hedge habitats for wildlife, in 2010 the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) programme coordinated a hedge-focused citizen science survey.\ud \ud Results:\ud Results from 2891 surveys were analysed. Woody plant species differed significantly between urban and rural areas. Beech, Holly, Ivy, Laurel, Privet and Yew were more commonly recorded in urban hedges whereas Blackthorn, Bramble, Dog Rose, Elder and Hawthorn were recorded more often in rural hedges. Urban and rural differences were shown for some groups of invertebrates. Ants, earwigs and shieldbugs were recorded more frequently in urban hedges whereas blowflies, caterpillars, harvestmen, other beetles, spiders and weevils were recorded more frequently in rural hedges. Spiders were the most frequently recorded invertebrate across all surveys. The presence of hard surfaces adjacent to the hedge was influential on hedge structure, number and diversity of plant species, amount of food available for wildlife and invertebrate number and diversity. In urban hedges with one adjacent hard surface, the food available for wildlife was significantly reduced and in rural hedges, one adjacent hard surface affected the diversity of invertebrates.\ud \ud Conclusions:\ud This research highlights that urban hedges may be important habitats for wildlife and that hard surfaces may have an impact on both the number and diversity of plant species and the number and diversity of invertebrates. This study demonstrates that citizen science programmes that focus on hedge surveillance can work and have the added benefit of educating the public on the importance of hedgerow habitats.

Accurate species identification is fundamental to biodiversity science, but the natural history skills required for this are neglected in formal education at all levels. In this paper we describe how the web application ispotnature.org and its sister site ispot.org.za (collectively, “iSpot”) are helping to solve this problem by combining learning technology with crowdsourcing to connect beginners with experts. Over 94% of observations submitted to iSpot receive a determination. External checking of a sample of 3,287 iSpot records verified > 92% of them. To mid 2014, iSpot crowdsourced the identification of 30,000 taxa (>80% at species level) in > 390,000 observations with a global community numbering > 42,000 registered participants. More than half the observations on ispotnature.org were named within an hour of submission. iSpot uses a unique, 9-dimensional reputation system to motivate and reward participants and to verify determinations. Taxon-specific reputation points are earned when a participant proposes an identification that achieves agreement from other participants, weighted by the agreers’ own reputation scores for the taxon. This system is able to discriminate effectively between competing determinations when two or more are proposed for the same observation. In 57% of such cases the reputation system improved the accuracy of the determination, while in the remainder it either improved precision (e.g. by adding a species name to a genus) or revealed false precision, for example where a determination to species level was not supported by the available evidence. We propose that the success of iSpot arises from the structure of its social network that efficiently connects beginners and experts, overcoming the social as well as geographic barriers that normally separate the two.