Mohammad Gharesifard

Biography

Mohammad Gharesifard received his BSc. degree in Civil Engineering from IAU University, Iran in 2005. He has seven years of combined study/design and construction supervision work experience in Iran's water sector. During this period he worked for water and environmental consulting companies and was involved in several socio-technical water and sanitation projects. Later on he enrolled in Water Resources Management MSc. program at IHE Delft and graduated with distinction in April 2015. Mohammad has a keen interest in studying innovative water management paradigms and especially the role of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) in citizen science initiatives. During his MSc. thesis research, he focused on understanding the behavioural determinants of ICT-based citizen participation in water management. He employed a social psychology framework from behavioural sciences to map influential factors on willingness of citizens to share their Personal Weather Station (PWS) data. He carried out this research within the scope of the WeSenseIt that is an EU-FP7 project in the area of environmental monitoring utilizing Citizen Observatories. Directly after graduation, he streamlined into a PhD under WeSenseIt, focusing on different dimensions and dynamics of ICT-based citizen participation in water management. 

Topic

Publications

Journal articles:

• Gharesifard, M., Wehn, U., & van der Zaag, P. (2017). Towards benchmarking citizen observatories: Features and functioning of online amateur weather networks. Journal of Environmental Management, 193, 381-393. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.02.003

• Gharesifard, M., & Wehn, U. (2016). To share or not to share: Drivers and barriers for sharing data via online amateur weather networks. Journal of Hydrology, Vol. 535, pp.181-190. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.01.036

Conference papers/abstracts:

• Gharesifard, M., Wehn, U., & van der Zaag, P. (2016). A framework for analyzing the impact of ICT-based citizen science initiatives. Paper presented at the International Conference on Citizen Observatories for Water Management, 7 – 10 June, Venice, Italy.
• Gharesifard, M., Wehn, U., & van der Zaag, P. (2016). Dimensions of citizen observatories: The case of weather observation networks. Paper presented at the 10th GEO European Projects Workshop 2016, 31 May – 2 June, Berlin, Germany.
• Gharesifard, M., Wehn, U., & van der Zaag, P. (2016). Dimensions and dynamics of citizen observatories: The case of online amateur weather networks. Paper presented at the EGU General Assembly 2016, 17 – 22 April, Vienna, Austria. 
• Gharesifard, M. and Wehn, U. (2015)  Participation in citizen science: Drivers and barriers for sharing personally-collected weather data via web-platforms, presentation at the 8th International Conference on ICT, Society and Human Beings (ICT2015), 21-23 July, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.
• Gharesifard, M., & Wehn, U. (2015). Workshop: ICT-enabled Amateur Weather Networks - motivations and barriers for citizen participation, EnviroInfo and ICT4S (pp. 256). Copenhagen, Denmark: University of Copenhagen.
• Gharesifard, M., Jahedan, A., & Molazem, B. (2012). Determining the Suitable Sediment extraction Locations of Existing Sand and Gravel Mines on Boshar River in Iran using HEC-RAS Modeling. Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Scour and Erosion –ICSE-6, Paris, France.

Books/Book chapters:

• Gharesifard, M., & Wehn, U. (2016). What Drives Citizens to Engage in ICT-Enabled Citizen Science?: Case Study of Online Amateur Weather Networks, Analyzing the Role of Citizen Science in Modern Research (pp. 62-88). Hershey, PA, USA: IGI Global.
• Gharesifard, M. (2015). Mapping the behavioural determinants of ICT-based citizen participation in water management; Case studies of  sharing personally-collected weather data via web-platforms in the Netherlands, UK and Italy. IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Delft, the Netherlands. (MSc Thesis WM-WRM-15.11)