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Kolok to discuss ‘crowdsourced science’ at Groundwater Summit

Westerville, OH – A water resources expert will explore how society can address water issues during the keynote talk at the Groundwater Summit during Groundwater Week in December in Las Vegas.

The talk, “Crowdsourcing and Wicked Water Quality Problems: The Use of Citizens in Groundwater Quality Assessment,” will be presented by Alan Kolok, PhD, director of the Idaho Water Resources Research Institute at the University of Idaho. Kolok has written more than 80 papers and two books, and is editor of the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.
 
In his presentation, Kolok will argue that water pollution has shifted in the United States from being primarily a point-source to a nonpoint-source issue, the National Ground Water Association said in a news release.
 
In this environment, it is difficult to remediate problems that are occurring and to assess the temporal and spatial extent of the problem, the release said.
 
Kolok suggests that crowdsourced science, that is, data collected by individuals acting more or less autonomously from each other, is both a useful and a powerful tool for data collection. It allows for the rapid accumulation of large databases, and for those data to be collected simultaneously and with considerable geographic precision.
 
In his talk, Kolok will give examples illustrating how crowdsourced science is helping to amass data relative to water quality, from both surface water and ground water, on a landscape scale.