Project description
Empowering citizens to preserve soil health
European soil health faces a critical challenge, threatening ecosystems and livelihoods. Degraded soils endanger agriculture, biodiversity and water quality. In this context, the EU-funded ECHO project aims to empower citizens through soil knowledge, data collection and decision-making. Its overarching goal is to actively involve EU citizens. Specifically, it operates on three core principles: engagement, empowerment, and enabling. It aims to motivate citizens to protect and restore soils, provide them with knowledge and an active role in data collection, and to empower them to participate in decision-making on soil-related matters. Tailored citizen science initiatives will span different regions and address diverse stakeholder needs. The project will create ECHOREPO, an open-access repository, facilitating the dissemination of citizen-generated data.
Objective
The overall aim of ECHO is to engage EU citizens in soil health increasing their knowledge, by generating new data on the health status of EU soils to complement existing soil mapping and soil monitoring in EU Member States, and awareness on the ecological and societal importance of soils. ECHO is based on 3 main principles: 1) to engage citizens motivating them to protect and restore soils; 2) to empower citizens by providing knowledge and an active role in data collection; 3) to enable citizens to directly participate in decision-making on soil issues. ECHO will achieve this through co-creation with target societal groups as a cornerstone of delivering a step change in increased soil literacy in society across Member States. ECHO will develop tailor-made citizen science initiatives across EU Member States taking into account different land-uses, soil types and biogeographical regions as well as stakeholder needs, overcoming the recognised challenges related to age, culture, background and language (28 initiatives with 16500 sites assessed). Our ambition is to actively involve and engage citizens building the capacities and knowledge to promote soil stewardship across EU and foster social change through trust and improved understanding of soil. ECHO will create ECHOREPO, a long-term open access repository, fed with citizen science data to be exploited not only by scientists but also by the general public and end-users. This will leverage and provide added-value to existing data and other relevant soil monitoring initiatives. ECHO´s consortium consists of 16 participants with 9 leading universities and research centres, 5 SMEs, and 2 Foundations. The participants from small companies and foundations, as business and civil society representatives, are complementary to the soil and social sciences experts of academic partners and crucial to achieve the ambitious goals of ECHO.
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Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
39100 Bolzano
Italy