CiSciSusaki

CiSciSusaki is intended to complement the ongoing FWF project Socioecological transitions, sustainability and collapse of island communities: the case of Samothraki (SUSAKI). SUSAKI aims at analyzing society-environment relations, building upon a sociometabolic understanding of socioecological systems. It simultaneously seeks out to give scientific support to an effort of turning the whole island of Samothraki into a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, a process officially endorsed by the municipality of Samothraki and the Greek UNESCO commission since 2011. CiSciSusaki will employ several types of citizen science methods crowdsourcing, distributed intelligence, participatory and collaborative science to generate improved knowledge and achieve a better understanding of the elements of the sociometabolic process that are currently considered as most critical for sustainability: the modes of farming of small ruminants (WP1), the issue of overgrazing and erosion (WP2), the ineffective protection of the existing nature conservation areas (WP3), and a potential shift towards a circular economy by an improved waste management (WP4). The project will involve a small number of local organizers in the conceptualization and design, and approximately 60 more citizen scientists in various active roles. Each year, a joint workshop between local citizens and scientists will reflect upon the outcome of the activities (WP5). As a result of a long-term scientific presence on the island, solid collaboration ties already exist between the research team and the municipality, as well as several citizen groups. CiSciSusaki will, in the best case, not only generate improved scientific results for SUSAKI, but also trigger a broad transformative learning process among the citizens that could turn the current crisis into a success story of sustainability.

The Citizen Science extension project "CiSciSusaki: Citizen science as a key pathway to achieve effective nature conservation and a sustainability transition on the island of Samothraki" contributed to transdisciplinary activities of the stand-alone project "SUSAKI: Socioecological transitions, sustainability and collapse of island communities: the case of Samothraki". The main activities were planned as contribution to SUSAKI's main research goal, the reconstruction of the island's socioecological system, by using ecological, sociological and socioecological methods. The project empowered local citizens to set their own agenda, define their goals and acquire competencies and knowledge to effectively pursue them. We were able to collect a series of valuable data and exposed a large number of local citizens to performing socioecological research. The citizen science extension enabled successful outreach to a substantially higher number of small ruminant farmers, a group of people otherwise not easily accessible. In collaboration with Greek and Portuguese partners we applied a mix of grazing resistant seeds to more than 13 ha and were able to involve more than 20 farmers into the research process. Moreover, with a group of more than 20 highly engaged local citizens we could assess the current state of the island's mountainous oak forests. As it turned out, many of the participants saw these forests for the first time and were largely unaware of the outstanding natural features of the island - but also of the dangerous lack of regrowth of those forests. Finally, the successful implementation of a composting experiment resulted in the installation of 3 wooden composters at the island's primary schools. The experiment is now in its third year and fulfills high educational purpose for teachers, kids and their parents. The long-term goal is to reduce the organic fraction of waste in the municipal solid waste containers.