In the first week of March, our German partners at RWTH Aachen University presented our project with a poster at the ECSA 2026 conference hosted by the University of Oulu in Finland.
The conference of the European Citizen Science Association is an opportunity for the citizenscience community to share experiences, knowledge, and ideas. Where better to present the EcoStories project than at the ECSA conference?
This year, around 650 researchers and practitioners in the field of citizen science, policymakers, science funders, NGOs, and interested citizens travelled to northern Finland to connect. The location was even more special because Oulu is crowned the European Capital of Culture for 2026.
The conference stands under the theme “Citizen Science bridging Centre and Periphery.” This topic served as a starting point for discussing the challenges and opportunities of implementing citizen science in contexts that are socially, institutionally, or scientifically distant from centres of power. Questions arose such as: how can citizen science serve as a tool for inclusion in areas or fields that are often overlooked or underrepresented, and how can citizen science engage marginalised communities in scientific research?
The conference’s topic strongly aligns with the key goal of our project: to make science accessible to students, especially those from immigrant backgrounds, and to involve them in it. Therefore it was a great opportunity for us to contribute and showcase our results. Moreover, facilitating collaborations through citizen science is a major priority, which raises the question of how citizen science can help connect diverse knowledge systems and enable inclusive, equitable, and cooperative approaches to research. From this perspective, it is encouraging to see our project serving as a model. Our EcoStories team started as individuals from different backgrounds and countries. All of us work in the educational sector as teachers, researchers, or project managers. Despite these differences, we joined a task force to build a foundation for schools on which teachers or educators can implement citizen science. We face various problems in the communities where we live, but we see the potential of citizen science to bridge those differences and open research to everyone, especially to those who seem to fall out. We are confident that citizen science is a tool not only to motivate students for STEMbased lessons but also to give students with a migration background the opportunity to participate in science.
Snowed in and under the Northern Lights, it was a week full of interesting presentations, informative round tables, and exciting meetings and workshops. Presenting our project with a poster at the poster session was a great way to further promote it. A QR code directed conference attendees directly to our ebook, and we hope it will continue to spread from there.
