| 25 Sep 2025
Make the invisible visible: Reveal the Magnetic Field and Air Pollution to Foster Engagement in a Community-based Participatory Research Project
Abstract. Citizen science is increasingly recognized as essential for engaging the public in participatory sustainability research and for addressing the complex challenges of the Anthropocene. However, fostering meaningful dialogue between science and society remains difficult, often hindered by limited opportunities for interaction and varying levels of scientific understanding. Identifying outreach formats that foster citizen engagement and initiate productive exchanges between scientists and the public is therefore a key challenge.
Here we present a hands-on science outreach workshop, based on environmental magnetism methods and conducted at schools and science fairs, that encourages citizen participation in air monitoring projects. We conducted the workshop between 2018 and 2023, reaching 850 people at 9 scientific outreach events and 195 children at 3 elementary schools. The workshop prompted more than 150 people to participate in the associated NanoEnvi community-based participatory research project, which offers to host passive biosensors in their homes or at school for a year. The workshop includes three hands-on demonstrations and experiences. It proposed to discover the magnetic phenomena, to extract airborne magnetic particles from soils, and to measure air pollution trapped on bark like a scientist. The workshop was also accompanied by lectures and an exhibition.
We observed that the workshop fostered two-way dialogue between researchers and a wide range of participants, creating opportunities for shared experimentation and knowledge co-production. We found that the positive emotions raised by experimenting and playing with magnetic phenomena during the workshop led to engagement in a participatory project on potential air pollution in urban surroundings. Our findings demonstrate that hands-on geoscience outreach activities have a positive impact on the science-society dialogue.
It’s a nice work to “make the invisible visible” and thus improve engagement—is compelling and timely, fitting well within the rise of citizen science and environmental justice initiatives.
Overall, I would like to give a major review as this requires a good amount of revision in terms of rewriting the paper. The representations and flow need to be improved.
Some other areas to improve – a) very few references were included, especially comparing other citizen science projects with similar nature – should add much more insights from the existing citizen science projects; b) results section requires major rewriting – major sub-sections in results are inadequately written; c) evaluation methods (depending upon objectives – improved awareness etc.) were not adequately discussed.
Here are a few other suggestions –
Abstract – please make the abstract more focused. Specifically mention the objectives and methods. It needs to answer what environmental magnetism project and link to air pollution monitoring. Passive sensor to monitor what? Requesting to make the abstract a bit more specific.
Methods
There is no 2.2 section.
In section 1 or 2, it’s important to mention the objective and aim for the study. Is it improving citizen awareness or testing new methods for crowd-sourcing data in future or something else? The objective is not clear. "To promote encounters and get our experiences out of the laboratory" – is a bit generic – need to add some specific and tangible one.
Although a reference has been provided, it would be good to provide details of how tree bark works to detect air pollution. Section 3.4 needs to be more improved. Please take time (possibly add pictures in supplementary) to explain in more detail.
How were participants introduced in the method linking the passive monitoring by tree bark? How did you address issues like "what if we buy a low-cost sensor instead of the passive method?" from the participants?
Why was a survey not conducted? Please provide some reasons.
Results
Section 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 – are inadequate and need some rewriting and addition of information. These sections depend a lot on the overall objective of the study. So depending upon the objective, some sections can be scrapped off and some sections can be explained in detail.