The article, titled “Indigenous community-based approaches to environmental justice through citizen science” explores how citizen science initiatives can support Indigenous communities in addressing environmental justice challenges. The study focuses on the Katari River Basin in Bolivia, where pollution from mining, urban wastewater, industrial discharge, and agricultural runoff has significantly degraded water quality and affected downstream Indigenous Aymara communities.

Using a participatory research approach, the project involved local community members—particularly high school students—in collecting and analyzing water quality samples over several months. The results revealed consistent exceedances of national water quality standards for parameters such as dissolved solids, phosphate, and turbidity.

Beyond the scientific findings, the study highlights how citizen science can strengthen environmental awareness, support knowledge exchange between researchers and communities, and stimulate dialogue about environmental rights and governance. At the same time, the authors emphasize that community monitoring alone is not sufficient to achieve environmental justice without supportive legal frameworks and institutional responses.

The work contributes to ongoing discussions on participatory environmental monitoring and demonstrates how citizen science can help bridge scientific research, local knowledge, and environmental policy.

Publication
Agramont, A., Baltodano Martinez, A., Gharesifard, M., Villafuerte Philippsborn, L., Lizarazo-Rodriguez, L., Warner, S., & van Griensven, A. (2026). Indigenous community-based approaches to environmental justice through citizen science. Sustainability Nexus Forum.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00550-026-00588-2

On the final day of the conference, Dr. Marit Bogert presented a paper in a session that focused on innovative and more bottom-up or co-design approaches in evaluating CS projects. She presented a paper that was published last year, focusing on qualitatively evaluating citizen scientists’ experiences by involving them in identifying frameworks and approaches that best capture and represent their experiences. The session showed a lot of overlap in the experienced difficulties and opportunities, while also showcasing the broad range of approaches that can be applied. 

On January 29th, the annual CS-NL Networking Day took place in Utrecht. A day full of workshops about all aspects of CS, ranging from CS in health or education, embedding it in HEI’s, or how CS can be combined with art. The CS-team at RUG, Dr. Mohammad Gharesifard and Dr. Marit Bogert, hosted a workshop on CS Impact Assessment, together with Margaret Gold from the Citizen Science Lab of Leiden University. 

The workshop was well attended and sparked many discussions and ideas about the limits on impact assessments and the impacts of impact assessment itself. Through making a hotlist (favourite or recommended Impact Assessment tools and methodologies) and a wishlist (what tools or things do you wish for to improve assessment or make it easier), we came to very creative outcomes. 

Amongst those was the regularly mentioned “time machine”: assessing your project's impact would be so much easier if you could relive how things happened, pause everything to have more time, or look forward to predict where things are going. Though this is difficult, we can think about support that can facilitate this way of working, slowing down the project pace and allowing more time for reflection and thinking ahead. In addition, the overwhelming amount of tools makes it hard to pick the right one, especially since every project has its own context and goals. The main take-away from the workshop is that there is a need for organization here, which we will continue to work on in the coming months!

Curious about all outcomes? Please find all the materials on the CS-NL Zenodo (Link: https://zenodo.org/records/18457895)!
We also created  hand-out with a quick overview of most common Impact Assessment tools, please find that here (link: https://zenodo.org/records/18457895/files/Impact%20assessment%20resources_DEF.pdf?download=1)