Air quality, soil moisture, green roof moisture and weather data from Meetjestad

Soil moisture sensors were developed by citizen science collective Meet je Stad (Measure your City). Measure your City was started in 2015 by inhabitants of the City of Amersfoort, with the goal of measuring climate related indicators. To be able to do so, collaboration was sought with the City of Amersfoort (COA), the local Water Authority and the University of Applied Sciences of Amsterdam. For the first three years the initiative focused on measuring temperature and humidity. Importantly, citizens develop their own research questions, analyze the data together with professionals and discuss potential implications. By doing so, the collective uses citizen science to spread knowledge on both technology and climate change in the most grass-roots manner possible. Within the SCOREwater project, Measure your City was asked to expand measurements with soil moisture measurements and additional temperature and humidity sensors.

An important note here is that Measure your City develops their own sensors, has developed their own data platform and uses its own gateways purchased from the Things Network. As a result, much effort is put into constructing sensors that are reliable, low-maintenance and accurate. The latter is important for the City of Amersfoort as well, which intends to not only work on shared knowledge and understanding, but also use the data for policy making. To do so the data has to be reliable. By deploying both these sensors and purchasing company-built sensors, we can compare the data to assess how reliable the Measure your City sensors are.

The Measure your City can also be deployed on green roofs to measure soil moisture. Whereas the soil moisture sensor measures soil moisture on two depths (10 centimeter and 40 centimeter), the sensor on a roof only measures soil moisture on one depth. In addition to soil moisture, Measure your City also measures air temperature and relative humidity. Some sensors also measure air quality (particle matter).