NovelEco

NovelEco is a citizen science project funded by the European Research Council seeking to find out how people perceive urban wild spaces. This NovelEco app incorporates a publicly accessible interactive Internet-based interface for input, feedback, communication, and management with volunteered geographic information (VGI). It serves as an information data gathering hub for the project team and gathers ecological and social data by the Citizen Scientists and over time will enable social network analysis. NovelEco enables users to record and upload ecological data in urban wild spaces in a user-friendly, accessible, and functional manner.

• NovelEco’s purpose is to gather crowdsourced ecological data in urban novel ecosystems, mainly using plants that can be found growing in unexpected places and abandoned or overlooked spaces. • It supports collaborative networking among citizen scientists and enables the gathering of social science data relating to attitudes to novel ecosystems and rewilding in an urban context. • It will ultimately become a repository of flora data in urban habitats that will be publically available to all citizens, as well as data on social values and perceptions that will be held privately. • All of the social data is restricted to comply with GDPR.

This research is the first to generate research questions with communities and individuals. The NovelEco App is running on the SPOTTERON Citizen Science Platform.