About us

Linnaea Cahill

I am a PhD student at the University of Zürich and started my work on the CrowdWater project in September 2025. Prior to this, I completed my Master’s Degree at TU Delft in the Netherlands. I am originally from the USA and Guatemala, where I began my academic journey in Civil Engineering, and gained an appreciation for citizen science. Through my work with CrowdWater, I aim to improve our ability to predict hydrological extremes in data-scarce catchments using citizen science data

Rieke Goebel

I have been working as a community manager in CrowdWater since November 2022. As a Geography student I am interested in the different processes on Earth. My favorite part is how the processes of different systems work together. CrowdWater connects many of these systems with the two main ones being hydrology and citizen science.

Vanja Maksimovic

I have been part of the CrowdWater project since April 2025. I am studying Earth System Science at the University of Zurich, with a particular interest in the interaction between water and atmospheric processes. For me, CrowdWater offers a unique opportunity through Citizen Science to further explore this system and to view hydrological processes from a new perspective.

Dr Ilja van Meerveld

I am a researcher at the University of Zurich. My research focuses mainly on understanding hydrological processes. I have been involved in field-studies in a range of places (Canada, USA, Alps, Madagascar, Philippines) and am interested in citizen science in hydrology because it provides new opportunities to obtain hydrological data and knowledge, and allows us to study previously unmonitored areas.

Prof Dr Jan Seibert

As a hydrologist I am curious about water. Current research topics include the use of catchment models for land-use and climate change impact studies, runoff generation processes and their representation in models, the value of different types of data and uncertainty analysis. Today’s mobile devices provide exciting opportunities to include the public in hydrological observations

Dr Sara Blanco

I was a PhD student at the University of Zurich and started my work on the CrowdWater project in September 2020. I am from Costa Rica and have completed my Bachelor’s and Licentiate’s degrees in Geography at the University of Costa Rica. My research was about citizen science to generate data about surface water quality. I continued researching better methods and approaches to citizen science in hydrology and applied them in regions like the one I come from.

Dr Mirjam Scheller

I was a PhD student at the University of Zurich and started working on the CrowdWater project in September 2020. I am from Germany and did my Master’s Degree at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg. With the help of the project, I further improved the collection and management of data obtained by crowdsourcing, and I hoped to awaken the public’s interest in water resources and their protection.

Here you can find more information about my PhD project.

Franziska Clerc-Schwarzenbach

I worked as a community manager at CrowdWater from December 2019 to January 2023. During this time, my interest in hydrology and citizen science has grown more and more. In my master’s thesis I explored the value of data from the CrowdWater project for hydrological modeling. You can find more information about that here. Since February 2023, I am a PhD student in the research group of Jan and Ilja. In my PhD, I will continue to investigate the value of limited data in hydrology, and I will definitely be inspired by the data from the CrowdWater project.

Dr Simon Etter

The focus of my work was on the value of crowdsourced streamflow and water level class estimates for the calibration of hydrological models. Furthermore, I focused on the quality of water level class data that was collected with the CrowdWater app and with paper forms by citizen scientists as well as the motivations of citizen scientists to contribute.

I will still contribute to CrowdWater and continue to support the project with different contributions.

Dr Barbara Strobl

My dissertation is titled “Quality of Crowdsourced Water Level Observations”. It focusses on the accuracy of water level class data (collected via the virtual staff gauge approach) and on how this accuracy can be further improved. For this we developed the CrowdWater game, which enabled us to crowdsource the quality control and to train new citizen scientists.

My official role in the CrowdWater project might have ended, but I am still an active citizen scientist. I enjoy collecting hydrological data with the CrowdWater app and contributing to the quality control with the CrowdWater game.

Wang Ze

I was a visiting doctoral student at the University of Zurich between September 2021 and September 2022. I am from China and a PhD student at Dalian University of Technology. My research area is the use of machine learning techniques for hydrological monitoring and modeling.

Here you can find more information about my PhD project