Feasibility study of watershed monitoring with participation of watershed citizens, case study: the Chehl-Chai Watershed, Golestan Province, Iran

The aim of this study is to assess the feasibility of monitoring precipitation, temperature and river stage variables in the Chehl-Chai Watershed with the participation of citizens/stakeholders. Simple and low-cost measurement tools were designed and provided to the local volunteers (two students, three women and one man) and they monitored the variables for five months. The data were recorded on paper forms and/or communicated through cellphones (text messages and social media applications of WhatsApp and Telegram). The citizen-collected data were compared with formal gauging stations using different statistical metrics including correlation coefficient, paired-sample t-test and kappa index. Results revealed that, the difference between the recorded data by the participants and those of gauging stations were not statistically significant. A female citizen with academic education of bachelor’s degree recorded the highest frequency of data that had the highest correlation with the recorded data in the formal precipitation and temperature monitoring stations, while the technical staff man from the Natural Resources Management Office recorded the least frequent data that had the least correlation with the recorded data in the formal monitoring stations. In overall, the promising level of citizens’ performance in monitoring the watershed, suggests that it is really feasible to collect reliable, on-time, and long-term data that can be used to obviate lack of data, particularly in remote mountainous areas and facilitates the decision-making and watersheds management process.