CoRe-ACTS – Coastal Resilience: Action Through Citizen Science

Country: Ireland

Lead organisation: University College Dublin 

Short Description:

This project aims to expand and enhance the citizen science activities initiated in 2023. The scope of the ongoing CoRe-ACTS project is to turn a technology used by scientists for the study of coastal morphodynamics into a citizen science initiative. The Smart Pebble technology offers a low-cost, scalable solution for assessing sediment transport, erosion patterns, and morphological changes in sediments. Its combination with a citizen science approach has the potential to empower local communities to conduct most of the activities independently, allowing them to actively participate in monitoring coastal dynamics by tracking pebble movement across the beach. Following the successful implementation of the Smart Pebbles project in Killiney, Dublin, involving local groups and schools, this project aims to empower communities to independently conduct their own citizen science initiatives. We will provide all necessary instrumentation and training, integrating these activities into their existing annual plans for village maintenance. The implementation of such an operational protocol would allow the continuous acquisition of data related to pebbles displacement and their morphological changes, providing the scientific team data with a temporal density never reached before within the scientific community. Based on the successful outcomes of this initial Irish project, we aim to develop a replicable citizen science model that can be adapted for implementation on other European beaches.

Objectives & Goals:

The CoRe-ACTS project monitors coastal erosion by employing Smart Pebbles – standard pebbles collected on the beach under study embedded with Radio Frequency identification (RFID) tags which can be detected by a hand-operated Reader. Prior to deployment, each Smart Pebble is 3D scanned and then precisely geolocated using an RTK-GPS. Citizen scientists periodically locate and recover the Smart Pebbles using the reader, re-acquiring their position and 3D model.

Website: https://score-eu-project.eu/2023/10/06/raising-students-awareness-with-the-smart-pebbles-workshop/