scitingly is a personal science initiative to harness social media for environmental monitoring, create public awareness for critical environmental challenges and mobilise communities for citizen science.

Using social media to gather new environmental observations is at the core of this effort; the millions of casually contributed nature observations on platforms like Twitter can augment traditional environmental monitoring and unearth critical warnings for environmental threats.

Most importantly however, the ad-hoc micro-communities forming in Twitter conversations around those casual environmental observations are essentially — albeit unknowingly — embryonic citizen science communities that could be mobilized for an active engagement in environmental challenges.

Finally, given the exponential transformations that are required in the next decade to address the climate crisis, it is crucial that critical research is communicated effectively and can support an informed public debate. “Publish and forget” is thus not an option. Environmental researchers and research organizations must be able to understand and continuously monitor the public online impact of their research. To that end I am working on tools to analyze Twitter conversations on environmental and sustainability topics. Results of the most recent project I participated in show that the backlash on social media can completely drown out even the main message of a long-running, well-funded research project promoted through a professional communications effort.

scitingly aims to provide an effort to combine these three areas and utilise the benefits of social media as an inherently democratic communication and networking tool.