Waikato water monitoring researcher wins travel award

University of Waikato PhD student Monica Peters has won a NZ$3000 Fulbright New Zealand Travel Award for her research into citizen science and water-quality monitoring.

Fulbright New Zealand Travel Awards are for New Zealand academics, artists or professionals to present their work to American audiences. Peters will use her scholarship to attend the 34th International North American Lake Management Society Symposium in Tampa, Florida.

University of Waikato PhD student Monica Peters. 

Peters’ PhD research is inspired by volunteer community groups throughout New Zealand that are carrying out environmental restoration in degraded landscapes such as gullies, lakes, wetlands and forests. She is exploring whether their ‘citizen science’ monitoring data can be integrated with ‘professional science’ data to build a more complete picture of environmental health.

Peters explained that in the US there is a long history of water-quality monitoring being carried out by community groups, with the data later analysed by scientists on behalf of research managers. She wondered, “What can we learn from these successful volunteer programs in the US that could be applied to New Zealand? Community volunteer involvement potentially represents a whole spectrum of data collection and observation that otherwise wouldn’t be done.”

Peters will spend time with Florida Lake Watch at the University of Florida, which is a volunteer network set up to collect data with the university acting as a lab to assess the data. Then she’ll go on to the Lake Sunapee Protective Association in New Hampshire to talk to volunteers and find out what motivates them and how their programs work.

Peters was also the winner of the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition in 2013, securing her a spot in the Trans-Tasman 3MT to be held in Perth in November. She will head to the US soon afterwards.