Environment Agency: Scaling Citizen Science Through AI-Powered Digital Engagement

The Environment Agency manages thousands of waterways and coastal environments across England, but gathering continuous, on-the-ground intelligence from the people who visit them is challenging and resource-intensive.

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Without a scalable way to engage communities, valuable observations about water quality, environmental conditions and how people use and experience waterways can be missed every day.

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This creates gaps in the Environment Agency’s understanding of what happens on the ground between formal monitoring activities, making it harder to identify emerging issues, understand local patterns and prioritise where limited resources are most needed. 

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Why AI-Powered Citizen Science Matters:

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Traditional environmental monitoring can provide valuable structured data, but it cannot capture everything happening across England's waterways every day. 

AI-powered public engagement provides a scalable way to involve communities in citizen science, allowing people to contribute observations as part of their everyday activities.

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For the Environment Agency, this creates an additional source of real-world intelligence while giving the public an opportunity to participate, learn and contribute to the environments around them.

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‍Our Solution (an AI Digital Assistant and Digital Team Member):

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Hello Environment is an AI-powered Digital Team Member created by Hello Lamp Post for the Environment Agency. It acts as a digital assistant for citizen science, allowing people to share observations about the rivers, lakes and beaches they visit while providing them with relevant, location-specific environmental information.

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‍How it Worked: 

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Hello Environment puts the power of environmental monitoring in the public's pocket, turning everyday visits to rivers, lakes and beaches into opportunities to contribute to citizen science.

Using an AI-powered Digital Team Member, people can have a natural conversation about what they see and experience, submit environmental observations and share photographs and location information in real time.

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Phase 1 (WaterWatch): First launched as a five-site pilot, visitors were invited to chat with an AI Digital Assistant using QR-enabled signage to share what they could see, experience and observe at the water’s edge, including wildlife, pollution and river usage.

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Phase 2 (BluePrint): Now a national programme, the public can contribute observations from any river, lake or beach in England, without the need for physical signage. Hello Environment is highly scalable, making it easy to expand to new locations, and roll out nationally without significant additional physical infrastructure or resources.

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User Experience:

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Visitors engage in a natural, two-way digital conversation via their mobile phone, and are able to upload photos, share their location and submit environmental observations in real-time on a range of topics, including issues like water quality, pollution and visitor activity.

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With location awareness, each interaction is more relevant to the visitor’s environment around them. With our AI-powered Digital Assistants, they deliver location-specific content and insight from sources like Swimfo and the Met Office, including updates on water quality and pollution risk forecasts. 

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Staff Impact:

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By automating the collection and structuring of community observations, Hello Environment gives the Environment Agency access to a larger and more consistent source of environmental intelligence without requiring a corresponding increase in manual data collection or physical resource. 

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With access to a real-time dashboard, staff are able to monitor incoming submissions as they are received, providing great visibility of emerging issues, trends and hotspots and enabling data to be reviewed and acted upon more efficiently.

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