P4Craters impact summary

The activeness of participants within a project is an important aspect of citizen science. Activeness depends on participants being aware that they are contributing to a project, having a lot of responsibility in the project, and being satisfied with the process of participation. This project should ensure that all aspects of activeness have been considered.

The degree of involvement of participants in a project is an important aspect of citizen science, and includes involving participants in multiple stages of the project, offering them multiple activities to take part in, and offering different levels of involvements depending on individual interests and availability. This project could consider whether there are more stages of the project that participants could be involved in for example by considering co-design or co-evaluation.

The Sustainable Development Goals are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be a "blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all". However, citizen science has a much broader remit, so it is ok that your project does not directly consider them. You can find more information on SDGs here, to see if there are any possible links between their aims and your project.

It looks like policy influence might not be a priority for the project. Of course, not every project can affect policy and some projects have a large impact on governance without ever interacting with official policy. If you're interested in the idea of citizen science as a form of socio-technical governance you can read more in this paper.

If the project is interested in influencing policy it could find inspiration from example projects in this report. It might not be a viable option if the project has already started, but citizen-science projects most often have success influencing policy when specific policies are considered in the design of the project and policy makers are engaged from the start of the project.

We know that economic productivity isn't a priority for most citizen-science projects. If you are interested in improving the economic productivity of the project, it might help to fully appraise any potential developments and advances made through the creation of a dedicated IPR plan. This will help reveal any economic potential that might have been overlooked, and support its exploitation.

You are on the right path! It is clear that the project has considered its financial sustainability into the future. However, there could be more to do. If one does not already exist, an exploitation plan could help sustain project outputs, whilst considering open-source software and tools could reduce costs.

Being environmentally aware means understanding how our behaviour impacts the environment and committing to making changes to our activities. The project could do more to educate participants on environmental challenges and contribute to participants' awareness of the natural environment, by explicitly disseminating information on sustainable lifestyles. 

This indicator considers the project's material footprint, polluting emissions, procurement policy, and pro-environmental actions for participants (such as litter picking). The project's score for this indicator shows that the project has considered some of these elements but to get a higher score the project needs to take measures to improve its environmental footprint in all these areas. 

Congratulations - in a world of "publish or perish", this project has high scientific productivity. With a large number of publications in high impact-factor journals, the project's research has been well cited, indicating outcomes have been widely shared.

By working across multiple disciplines , this project is making efforts to promote interdisciplinary ways of working. There is evidence that interdisciplinarity is statistically significantly and positively associated with research impact (Okamura, 2019), largely through the engagement of a wider audience. Keep up the good work!