AirLimnos is an initiative which was born by Web2Learn, a research and development company specialising in digital education, and has joined the CitiObs as an Alliance case in 2024. Prior to this, Web2Learn was implementing environmental citizen science initiatives with participation of schools, building critical connections within the local community of the remote island of Limnos. When the call for Alliance cases came, they saw it as an opportunity to develop a more strategic and structured approach to engage the community and take action on air quality issues.
Since the official launch of AirLimnos, the citizen observatory has continued to expand. On Limnos, four schools, the municipality, and a handful of community members are involved, and the momentum has spread to schools on the island of Lefkada as well as Athens and Thessaloniki, the two biggest cities of Greece. Building these collaborations takes time and effort. Web2Learn makes many calls seeking to engage with the schools and build trust with the school principals and professors. They must be very flexible and able to adapt to the schedules and rules of each school. Through years of experience, Web2Learn has expertise in how best to work with schools and adapt the educational materials and activities for different age groups and levels of knowledge. All this has led to a strong reputation so now schools even reach out to them with requests to collaborate.
Workshops with the students vary and sometimes include the students learning to assemble the Smart Citizen sensors themselves. AirLimnos utilized the Environmental Monitoring toolkit to guide these workshops, specifically implementing the guidance on how to analyse and visualize data, and consulted the participation toolkit at times. Through these processes they have seen how big a role teachers play in how actively the students then engage with the data collection. Students reported feeling motivated that their data was connected to an international platform. Parents and even the larger community in the rural areas and islands, get to know about the school initiatives and learn about air quality through this.
A prevailing challenge is the technical side of the monitors. When issues arise while setting them up and maintaining them, it can be difficult to solve in the moment. AirLimnos has relied on CitiObs to troubleshoot issues that cannot be resolved with guidance from the toolkit, but this can cause delays in activities. This remains an area for improvement.
AirLimnos has engaged roughly 300 students and 20 teachers in 9 schools in
4 locations in Greece, two urban (Athens, Thessaloniki), two islands (Lefkada, Limnos), since 2024 and has been actively involved in CitiObs's online workshops and joined other Alliance COs in Brussels for a study visit in 2025—there they enjoyed the more direct offline connection, noting that it sparked new and interesting ideas for how COs can impact change.
