# Seismic Observations in Bucharest Area with a Raspberry Shake Citizen Science Network
## 5 Concluding Remarks  
For more than 10 years, the National Institute for Earth Physics (NIEP) has been hosting, through EOT, a series of educational events (e.g., Otherwise School, Science and Technology Summer School in Magurele, Researchers' Night, Seismology Workshops for students, teachers, and others) aimed to popularize geosciences among citizens and to raise awareness and reduce seismic risk. The citizen science activities promoted by NIEP at educational events have the dual objective of collecting data and increasing citizen engagement and participation. Thus, citizen participation in risk-related science activities has proven effective in increasing risk awareness and preparedness for disaster risk reduction. Risk awareness and preparedness are, in fact, the key to a better response before, during, and after seismic events and can greatly reduce the number of casualties. These citizen science or educational networks with seismometers installed in civil buildings or schools are useful both for seismologists, as they complete the scientific data with real data, and for citizens who can obtain information about earthquakes directly. Citizen seismology has a high potential for raising community awareness of natural hazards. Citizens have an important role to play in gathering scientific data. Whether they like it or not, citizens are the first witnesses of seismic events and in such situations, they often have significant scientific knowledge that is too easily ignored. By involving citizens and using them as a primary source of information, scientists can study the population's reaction to seismic events (sociology of risk and risk management) and obtain important testimonies about the seismic events themselves. Thus, the aim of citizen seismology is to engage citizens to better understand seismic events and to protect societies more effectively. In the present paper, we show the capability of a network of low-cost instruments (Raspberry Shake Citizen Science network) installed in an area with strong earthquake impacts (Bucharest) to provide useful data and information for the general public and for  
Figure 12: Long-term changes in seismic noise at the R1784 seismometer. The zoomed area highlights the 31 October–6 November 2022 week. The peak on 3 November corresponds to the M\({}_{\rm L}\) = 5.3 Vrancea earthquake. research studies as well. To this aim, we analyze the data recorded by seven Raspberry Shake instruments between June 2020 and November 2022. During this time interval, 41 earthquakes with local magnitude above 4 (the largest magnitude being 5.3) were recorded, some of them being felt by the people in Bucharest. The rapid online access to seismograms and to online apps (ShakeNet Web and Desktop or Mobile) provides an excellent tool for citizen information and education. As our case study shows, the Raspberry Shake network can be useful in the rapid characterization of ground motion in correlation with macroseismic observations and in ambient noise analyses in urban areas. The spectrograms and amplitude-time plots from the ASN analysis show characteristics often found at stations located near anthropogenic noise sources. Both outline an increase in seismic noise power during the day in the 0.02-0.5 s (2-50 Hz) period range and a decrease during the night. The amplitude-time plot and spectrogram for seismometer R1784 installed at the French School Anna de Noailles also indicate a clear variation in noise level between weekdays and weekends. Students attending classes are responsible for the increased noise levels observed from Monday to Friday. A similar behavior of the ASN was also observed for several professional stations belonging to the Romanian Seismic Network that were installed in schools and kindergartens in Bucharest [19], concluding that the decrease in noise levels is predominantly related to reduced human mobility inside the buildings where the stations are housed. The conceptual idea of the study: B.Z. Creation of the dataset for the analyses: B.Z., B.G. and A.T.