Soil health related citizen-science projects

Soil-related citizen science projects have gained significant interest driven by the prominence of soil within public policy agendas. EUSO in collaboration with ECHO makes a review on previous citizen science projects, initiatives and activities that have engaged citizens to monitor soil. The database includes all those initiatives.
Resource Type: 
Datasets
Soil Projects Data
Registration is requested: 
No
Year: 
2024
Projects: 
Soil Mission Projects
Keywords: 
ECHO
Soil-related citizen science projects have gained significant interest driven by the prominence of soil within public policy agendas. Therefore, this review was undertaken to synthesize previous soil citizen science projects. The principal research objective was to create a systematic overview of previous soil citizen science projects, establishing a repository of potentially useful resources from past citizen science initiatives that study soil health. This repository allows for identifying knowledge gaps in past citizen science alternatives in terms the soil properties measured, geographic coverage, and citizen science methods employed.
 
In this work, over 60 citizen science projects that considered soil health were reviewed. Citizen science projects were collected based on literature search, expert interviews, project partner contributions and through the mailing lists of the European Network for Soil Awareness (ENSA) and the European Soil Data Center (ESDAC). All projects were then screened for the following characteristics: geographic coverage, duration, scientific factors (e.g. soil properties considered, fieldwork), technological factors (e.g. applications used) and their citizen engagement (e.g. target groups).
 
This database was constructed in context of the Soil Mission funded ECHO project, for the Deliverable 1.1 named “Report on the state of the art of citizen science applied to soil”. More information on the projects: https://echosoil.eu/


 

 

Download the Data.This includes 87 records (projects) classified in 5 categories (below). All the circa 40 fields are well self-explained.

Categories that were used to classify reviewed projects based on i.) public participation in scientific projects (Shirk et al. 2012), ii.) whether the main objective of the project was soil-centric or not. Category is the first column in the database. All fields in the database are well explained.
Category A: Collaborative/co-created citizen science participation, soil-specific objective (13 projects)
Category B: Collaborative/co-created citizen science participation, no soil-specific objective (3 projects)
Category C: Contributory citizen science participation, soil-specific objective (48 projects)
Category D: Contributory citizen science participation, no soil-specific objective (8 projects)
Category O: Other projects that did not fit into the review's selection criteria but were of interest to the ECHO horizon project (17 projects).

 

For any problem / question / comment on this dataset, please contact ec-esdac@ec.europa.eu

Notification:

  1. The data provided has been prepared for use by internal research activities in the Joint Research Centre (JRC) Ispra in collaboration with Soil Mission project ECHO.
  2. The data are the result of JRC research activities and are primarily made available for further research. The JRC does not accept any liability whatsoever for any error, missing data or omission in the data, or for any loss or damage arising from its use. The JRC agrees to provide the data free of charge but is not bound to justify the content and values contained in the databases.
  3. The permission to use the data specified above is granted on condition that, under NO CIRCUMSTANCES are these data passed to third parties. They can be used for any purpose, including commercial gain.
  4. The user agrees to:
    • make proper reference to the source of the data when disseminating the results to which this agreement relates;
    • Participate in the verification of the data (e.g. by noting and reporting any errors or omissions discovered to the JRC).



 

 

Reference of source (Citations) :

ECHO project: https://echosoil.eu/

When making reference to the ESDAC

  • Panagos, P., Van Liedekerke, M., Borrelli, P., Köninger, J., Ballabio, C., Orgiazzi, A., Lugato, E., Liakos, L., Hervas, J., Jones, A.  Montanarella, L. 2022. European Soil Data Centre 2.0: Soil data and knowledge in support of the EU policies. European Journal of Soil Science, 73(6), e13315. DOI: 10.1111/ejss.13315
  • Panagos P., Van Liedekerke M., Jones A., Montanarella L., “European Soil Data Centre: Response to European policy support and public data requirements”; (2012) Land Use Policy, 29 (2), pp. 329-338. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2011.07.003
  • European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC), esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu, European Commission, Joint Research Centre