Floods are the natural hazards that are causing the most deaths worldwide. Flood early warning systems are one of the most cost-efficient methods to reduce death rates, triggering decisions about the evacuation of exposed population. Although previous studies have investigated the effect of human behaviours on evacuation processes, studies analysing a combination of behaviours, flood onset and warning timing are limited. Our objective is to explore how changes on the aforementioned factors can affect casualties. This is done within a modelling framework that includes an agent-based model, a hydraulic model, and a traffic model, which is implemented for the case study of Orvieto (Italy). The results show that the number of casualties is most impacted by people’s behaviour. Besides, we found that a delay of 30 min in releasing the warning can boost the number of casualties up to six times. These results may help managers to propose effective emergency plans.

Much attention is being paid to the design and implementation of community-based monitoring initiatives of water and environment, and how to attract more citizens to participate in such initiatives. Although mass participation in collecting and sharing water-related or environmental data and good project design and implementation are key factors for the success of community-based monitoring, these initiatives do not operate in a void. Community-based monitoring initiatives are embedded in, and can influence, existing social, institutional, political and technological settings. In spite of the fact that these contextual factors are not static and constantly change over time, capturing their status quo at the initiation of a community-based monitoring activity delivers critical insights for establishing a sustainable initiative and can be used as a benchmark for assessing its subsequent outcomes and impacts. Yet, the salience of understanding the initial contextual settings is often underestimated, or these are only considered once an initiative has already been established. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of early stage research about such contextual realities. In order to do so, we employed the CPI Framework (Gharesifard et al., 2019) for conducting a systematic analysis of the baseline situation of two newly established community-based monitoring initiatives, one in the Netherlands and one in Kenya. The case study in the Netherlands focuses on the issue of pluvial flooding in an urban setting, while the Kenyan case study deals with balancing sustainable livelihoods and biodiversity management in a rural area. Our baseline analysis showed that aside from the fact that these initiatives have different thematic foci, there are distinct differences between the two in terms of access to technology, availability and accessibility of data, the institutional arrangements for public participation in decision making processes, and the level of citizen trust in the authorities in charge of managing the respective water-related and environmental issues. Based on the findings of this research, a number of recommendations are provided that can be beneficial for the future development and functioning of the two initiatives.

Crowd-sourced environmental observations are increasingly being considered as having the potential to enhance the spatial and temporal resolution of current data streams from terrestrial and areal sensors. The rapid diffusion of ICTs during the past decades has facilitated the process of data collection and sharing by the general public and has resulted in the formation of various online environmental citizen observatory networks. Online amateur weather networks are a particular example of such ICT-mediated observatories that are rooted in one of the oldest and most widely practiced citizen science activities, namely amateur weather observation. The objective of this paper is to introduce a conceptual framework that enables a systematic review of the features and functioning of these expanding networks. This is done by considering distinct dimensions, namely the geographic scope and types of participants, the network's establishment mechanism, revenue stream(s), existing communication paradigm, efforts required by data sharers, support offered by platform providers, and issues such as data accessibility, availability and quality. An in-depth understanding of these dimensions helps to analyze various dynamics such as interactions between different stakeholders, motivations to run the networks, and their sustainability. This framework is then utilized to perform a critical review of six existing online amateur weather networks based on publicly available data. The main findings of this analysis suggest that: (1) there are several key stakeholders such as emergency services and local authorities that are not (yet) engaged in these networks; (2) the revenue stream(s) of online amateur weather networks is one of the least discussed but arguably most important dimensions that is crucial for the sustainability of these networks; and (3) all of the networks included in this study have one or more explicit modes of bi-directional communication, however, this is limited to feedback mechanisms that are mainly designed to educate the data sharers.