CitizenClimate App User Guide

Welcome to the CitizenClimate app! This guide will walk you through the steps to set up your account, create projects and communities, and manage your profile. Let’s get started!

Citizen Science App Track SDG community led dMRV biodiversity monitoring

The Three User Roles

When you sign up, you choose one of three roles. Your role determines what you can see and do.

Community Member — the most common role. You collect data by filling out surveys, identifying species, participating in the forum, and completing lessons. You earn points and badges as you contribute.

Project Developer — you create and manage projects. You design the surveys, invite community members, review their submissions, create educational lessons, and access analytics dashboards including SDG metrics and biodiversity reports.

VVB (Validation & Verification Body) — a read-focused role for independent auditors. You review project data and access educational content. You cannot submit data or create projects.

Getting Started

First launch walks you through 12 onboarding slides explaining the app's main features. After that:

Tap Sign Up and fill in your name, email or username, and password.
Choose your role (Community Member, Project Developer, or VVB).
If you have an invite code from a project developer, enter it here — you'll be automatically placed into their project and community.
If you don't have a code, you can browse available projects or use the demo project to explore the app.
You land on the Home screen, which is your main dashboard.

If you already have an account, tap Log In and enter your email/username and password.

The Home Screen

The home screen is different depending on your role.

As a Community Member, you see:

Your name, role, points balance, and any badges you've earned
The project and community you belong to
A list of active surveys you can fill out
Buttons to quickly jump to: Submit Data, My Submissions, Leaderboard, Education, Forum, and other features enabled by your project developer

As a Project Developer, you see:

Your user card and a project selector dropdown (if you manage multiple projects)
Your surveys with action menus to view submissions, edit, or archive them
Buttons to: create surveys, create projects, manage community members, view SDG analytics, and more

Submitting Data (Community Members)

This is the core action. Tap Submit Data from the home screen.

Choose a survey from the list.
Answer each question in order. Questions can be multiple choice, text, numeric, date, photo, audio, or location-based.
Some surveys have conditional questions — follow-up questions that only appear based on your previous answer.
When you reach the end, review your answers and tap Submit.
If you're offline, your submission is saved locally and will sync automatically the next time you have a connection.

You earn points for each submission, which appear on the leaderboard.

Species Identification (AI-Powered)

From the home screen, you can identify plants, animals, birds, insects, mushrooms, and assess crop health using your camera.

Choose the type of species you want to identify (e.g., Plant ID).
Take a photo or choose one from your gallery.
The app sends the image to an AI system and returns a ranked list of possible matches with confidence scores.
Tap a result to read a Wikipedia summary about that species.
Confirm your selection, add any notes, and optionally attach a location.
Submit — you earn points and, if your project has a local currency reward enabled, tokens too.

If you're offline, the photo is saved locally and the identification is completed when you reconnect.

Education

The Education section contains lessons created by your project developer, plus a set of default lessons covering topics like biodiversity, carbon credits, and data collection techniques.

Tap a lesson to read it. At the end there's a short quiz. Completing lessons earns you points and contributes to your Lessons badge progress.

Badges

You earn badges by reaching milestones in six categories:

Total submissions
Lessons completed
Forum posts
Photos submitted
Audio recordings submitted
Members invited

Each category has three tiers. For example, submitting 5 surveys gets you "Novice Contributor", 20 gets "Active Contributor", and 50 gets "Dedicated Contributor". Your badge progress is shown on the Badges screen and summarized on your profile card.

Forum

The Forum is a discussion space organized by community and general topics.

Browse posts or search by keyword.
Tap a post to read it and add a comment.
Tap the compose button to create a new post with a title, text, and optional media or documents.
You can block users whose posts you don't want to see.
New posts load in pages of 20, and the list refreshes as you scroll.

The forum requires an internet connection.

Grievances
The Grievance screen lets you formally raise a concern related to the project.

Tap File a Grievance.
Give it a title and describe the issue.
Your grievance is submitted and tracked with a status: Pending → Under Review → Resolved.
The project developer can respond with a resolution note, which you'll see when you open the grievance.
Other community members can upvote grievances, helping the developer prioritize.

SDG Analytics (Project Developers)

The SDG screen gives a visual summary of how the project is performing against the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

Line charts show trends over time per goal.
Pie charts break down contributions by community.
You can filter by year and export the data as CSV or JSON.
SDG-linked surveys collect the underlying data — community members fill these out just like regular surveys.

Biodiversity

The Biodiversity screen aggregates all species observations submitted through the identification tools.

View counts by category (birds, plants, animals, insects, mushrooms).
See diversity indices: Shannon-Wiener, Simpson's, and Pielou Evenness — these are standard ecological metrics.
Filter by IUCN endangerment status to see if any observed species are threatened or endangered.
Export species data as CSV or JSON.

Mapped Routes and Farm Boundaries

Two field tools for capturing geographic data:

Mapped Route — start the GPS tracker and walk/cycle/drive a path. The app records your route as a line on a map, which is attached to your submission.

Farm Boundary Walkover — walk the perimeter of a farm or field. The app records your GPS path and closes it into a polygon, giving you an accurate area measurement. Useful for land-use monitoring.

Offline Mode

The app is designed to work in areas with no signal.

Your device caches the surveys, lessons, and your previous submissions locally.
When you submit data offline, it's saved in a local queue.
As soon as you reconnect, the app syncs your pending submissions to the cloud automatically.
A small banner appears at the top of the screen when you're offline.
Go to Sync Status (via your profile) to see exactly what's pending, what has synced successfully, and retry anything that failed.

Some features — leaderboard, forum posting, SDG analytics, and species ID completion — require an active connection.

Inviting Others (Community Members & Project Developers)

The Invite screen generates a unique code and QR image for your project and community.

Share the code or QR via any app (WhatsApp, email, etc.).
When a new user signs up and enters your code, they're automatically placed into your project and community.
You earn points and progress toward your Invites badge for each person you bring in.

Profile and Settings

Tap Profile in the bottom navigation to:

Edit your display name
See your email, role, project, and community
Switch projects or communities (Community Members can change; Project Developers use the dropdown on the home screen)
Sign out
Delete your account
Re-watch the onboarding tutorial
Access Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Language Support

The app supports English, Spanish, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Tagalog, Swahili, Arabic, Mandarin, Indonesian, and Ukrainian. You can change the language from the login/signup screen using the language selector in the top bar. The setting is saved and applies across the whole app. We can also add your language or dialect for free.

Tips for New Users

Use an invite code if you have one — it places you in the right project automatically and saves you from having to hunt for your community manually.
Try the demo project if you want to explore the app before joining a real project. It has sample surveys, forum posts, and leaderboard data.
Don't wait for signal to collect data — submit surveys in the field even when offline. They'll sync when you get back to Wi-Fi.
Check the Education section first — lessons explain what data you're collecting and why, which makes the surveys easier to fill out accurately.
Earn badges intentionally — the Badges screen shows your current progress toward each tier, so you can see how many more submissions, lessons, or posts you need to level up.

One App,
Many Uses

CitizenClimate is a mobile app for collecting environmental data in the field. It's used by communities, project developers, and independent auditors to monitor nature-based carbon credit projects — tracking things like biodiversity, land use, community wellbeing, and SDG (UN Sustainable Development Goal) progress. Think of it as a structured field notebook that syncs to the cloud, works offline, and rewards participation.

Platform

CitizenClimate