ScienceUs Harvest Phase: Turning Citizen Science Results into Lasting Impact
The Harvest Phase is the final stage of the ScienceUs support programme, marking an important transition for the five selected citizen science initiatives that have successfully advanced through the previous phases.
At this stage, the focus shifts from implementation to impact, policy relevance, stakeholder engagement, and long-term sustainability. The Harvest Phase is designed to help projects transform the knowledge, evidence, and lessons generated through their citizen science activities into meaningful outputs that can support decision-making, inspire future initiatives, and contribute to wider policy and innovation discussions across Europe.
What is the purpose of the Harvest Phase?
The Harvest Phase supports projects in moving beyond project execution and towards real-world influence. Its purpose is not only to help initiatives communicate their results, but also to ensure those results are translated into forms that are useful and accessible for policy makers, public authorities, academia, industry, and civil society.
Through this phase, ScienceUs helps participating projects strengthen the visibility, transferability, and sustainability of their work, while creating opportunities for their good practices to inspire other local and regional initiatives across Europe.
What happens during the Harvest Phase?
During the Harvest Phase, selected projects take part in the ScienceUs quadruple helix test-bed programme, where they engage with key actors across the innovation ecosystem. This process is designed to increase the policy relevance and long-term value of each initiative.
Main activities include:
- Participation in a Harvest Kick-off Meeting
- Implementation of a communication and dissemination plan
- Collaboration with policy makers, public authorities, industry, and academia
- Preparation of a policy brief or similar policy-oriented output
- Tailored training and mentoring on communication, policymaking, exploitation, and sustainability
- Submission of the final deliverable: Policy Assessment and Recommendations
Support provided through ScienceUs
To help participating initiatives maximise their outcomes, ScienceUs provides targeted support and mentoring in areas such as:
- Communicating citizen science results to different audiences
- Building stronger links with policy and decision-making processes
- Developing recommendations based on project findings
- Strengthening collaboration with quadruple helix actors
- Improving sustainability and exploitation potential beyond the lifetime of the project
This support equips projects with the tools and capacities needed to turn their work into visible, transferable, and lasting impact.
Expected outputs
By the end of the Harvest Phase, each project is expected to deliver outcomes that go beyond technical implementation. These include:
- A clear communication and dissemination approach
- Stronger engagement with policy and stakeholder communities
- A policy brief or equivalent policy-facing output
- Recommendations for future action and uptake
- The final deliverable: Policy Assessment and Recommendations
These outputs are intended to ensure that project learning is shared, applied, and amplified beyond the individual initiative itself.
Why the Harvest Phase matters
The Harvest Phase is where ScienceUs-supported initiatives consolidate their work and demonstrate how citizen science can contribute to meaningful societal and policy impact.
It is the phase where projects:
- Connect results with decision-making processes
- Amplify their visibility and relevance
- Build stronger transnational communities and collaborations
- Share their practices with other initiatives
- Contribute to broader policy and innovation discussions linked to the new European Research Area framework and Horizon Europe Missions
In this way, the Harvest Phase ensures that the value generated through citizen science does not end with implementation, but continues to shape broader systems of change.
Meet the five projects in the ScienceUs Harvest Phase
The Harvest Phase brings together five inspiring citizen science initiatives from across Europe, each addressing climate adaptation and resilience through participatory and community-driven approaches:
CoRe-ACTS – Coastal Resilience: Action Through Citizen Science is a project from Ireland, led by University College Dublin, that focuses on monitoring coastal erosion through the use of Smart Pebbles, an innovative low-cost technology embedded with RFID tags. By involving local communities and schools in tracking sediment movement and coastal change, the project empowers citizens to actively contribute to coastal resilience monitoring while building a model that can be replicated on other European beaches.
The Future is Climate is a project from Spain, led by Demos Lab, and is a citizen participation initiative aimed at understanding the barriers that hold back climate action among young people in Spain. By combining citizen science with deliberative democratic processes, the project brings together young people, scientists, and experts to co-create solutions, strengthen climate engagement, and promote more inclusive environmental governance.
Blue-Green Tops: Adapting Building Roofs for Climate Resilience is a project from Greece, led by the University of Patras, that explores how urban rooftops can be transformed into blue-green infrastructures that reduce heat, improve rainwater management, and enhance urban resilience. Through citizen science and open digital tools, the project collects rooftop and building data to support climate adaptation in Athens, while creating a replicable model for other cities.
Acqua Sorgente is a project from Italy, led by Club Alpino Italiano (CAI), dedicated to monitoring and protecting natural springs and groundwater resources in mountainous areas. Through volunteer-based data collection, the project contributes to hydrological research, biodiversity protection, and public awareness on water resource resilience, while building a national database to support long-term water management.
Alleviating Energy Poverty in Vulnerable Households is a project from Spain, led by the Spanish Red Cross, that tackles energy poverty as a major barrier to climate adaptation by empowering vulnerable households to monitor and improve their energy consumption. Through citizen science tools, participatory data collection, and practical energy-efficiency measures, the project promotes healthier homes, lower emissions, and greater resilience to climate risks such as heatwaves and cold spells.
From results to real impact
In the Harvest Phase, ScienceUs supports promising citizen science initiatives in transforming their findings into policy-relevant knowledge, stronger stakeholder engagement, and sustainable future pathways.
By helping projects connect evidence with action, ScienceUs reinforces the role of citizen science as a powerful driver of climate adaptation, public participation, and policy innovation across Europe.
“Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.”