Characterizing Swiss Alpine Lakes: from Wikipedia to Citizen Science

Abstract

Within the scope of a citizen science project that aims to understand the ecological impact of climate change on bacteria communities in Swiss alpine lakes, we designed and implemented an interactive information platform using data collected from Wikipedia, project-specific data, and other sources. By presenting information about Swiss alpine lakes in an interactive way, the goal of the platform is to raise awareness among the public about the state of Swiss alpine lakes, and ultimately to contribute to the conservation of these ecosystems by engaging citizens. Volunteers were invited to use and assess the platform, by answering questions about alpine lake facts and platform usability. The results show that users can accurately extract factual information from the platform. User feedback was also used to improve the platform functionalities. Finally, an online crowdsourcing activity for lake polygon drawing was conducted to enrich the Swiss alpine lake database with this information. The results show that users can implement this task with high quality.