Water Rangers
About the project
“Education is a lifeline for children in crisis.” (UN)
“Water Rangers Twente” was a citizen science project with temporarily displaced children from Ukraine, designed to engage them in a meaningful local activity, to contribute to their knowledge of ecology and sustainability, to provide an opportunity for participants to discover their new home environment, and to experience positive emotions during summer vacations. The initiative relied on several front-running trends, including citizen science and nature-based learning.
During a 3-week summer campaign in 2023, 17 participants from Almelo
went on bicycle field trips, collecting data on urban blue locations such as ponds and canals. First, they measured water quality (e.g., water transparency, presence of water animals) and took water samples for the nationwide Dutch citizen science project “Vang de Watermonsters” (by Natuur en Milieu and NIOO-KNAW). Second, they filled in protocols on the attractiveness of the visited places. In total, they collected data on 57 water bodies!
Project Goals
- collect data related both to the environment and to the human perceptions of urban blue spaces
- set up a collaboration between several actors, leading to a meaningful and transparent engagement of diverse stakeholders within the community, and contributing to the resilience of urban ecosystems and human population alike.
- empower newly arrived youth through education and engagement with public life and public spaces
- investigate the impact of place-based citizen science on spatial knowledge acquisition as well as place bonding and well-being
- promote place-based citizen science as a unique outdoor therapeutic activity
Current Outputs
Egorova, Ekaterina, Miller, Kateryna, and Rachel Pateman.“Place-based Citizen Science with Refugee Youth” (pp. 1–27). Zenodo, 2024. link
Egorova, Ekaterina. “Water Rangers Twente Project Report” (pp. 1–13). Zenodo, 2023. link
Teurlincx, Sven, et al. “Capturing elements of the Nature Futures Framework through in situ place descriptions: an empirical study in urban blue locations.” 4th International Symposium on Platial Information Science, PLATIAL’23, 2023.link
Egorova, Ekaterina, and Crystal Bae. “The image of the city by temporarily displaced children: how place-based citizen science contributes to place discovery.” 4th International Symposium on Platial Information Science, PLATIAL’23, 2023. link
I had been imagining rivers as something “empty”...And then we found all these water animals during the project – I could never imagine there were so many living creatures in the water!
“Water Rangers” (2022) project participant