Baltic Sea Project

From observations to citizen science “Observational data collected by crowdsourcing are called citizen observations. They are observations made on the observer's own initiative and on a voluntary basis on various topics observable in the environment and they have been submitted for common use. Observations can be made either on an individual citizen’s own initiative or they can be activities jointly agreed by different associations or groups…  Various targets and environmental monitoring applications can also be agreed to be used for observation. In that case, crowdsourcing and voluntary work may also be extended to ensure a sufficient number of observations to verify the accuracy of the observations or to summarize the observations. When also ordinary citizens are involved in asking research questions and drawing conclusions from summaries of findings, it can be called citizen science. Citizens’ observations are a part of citizen science.” ( https://www.ymparisto.fi/fi-FI/K

The BSP coordinators’ meeting for this past spring had been scheduled to take place in Tallinn on 2-3 April. Due to the Covid-19 lockdowns in all participating countries, the exciting visits that the Estonian hosts had planned, were called off, and the key presentations and discussions that were part of the original seminar plan, were eventually delivered on-line. Most of the Finnish BSP coordination group were planning to take part in the Tallinn meeting. With the corona pandemic escalating, we soon understood that it was not possible to convene anywhere – except on-line. Inspired by the giant leap taken by teachers and students to perform distance education as of mid-March, the Finnish team headed by the present BSP general coordinator Aira Undén-Selander, decided to suggest to the international coordinators of the BSP that the seminar should by no means be cancelled, but instead, it should be organised as a webinar. For me, this meant an unexpected chance to join the event, as I