Citizen Science Programs as Scientific Data Collection Approach of Soil Medium

Community-engaged data collection and research, known as citizen science, is becoming increasingly popular in modern research. Citizen science programs, using social media platforms, provide an efficient means of rapidly gathering substantial and relevant data for scientific inquiries in a cost-effective manner.

In Hungary, the first citizen science program, titled "Life in Undies”, was launched in 2021 by the Institute for Soil Sciences. This initiative, inspired by the Canadian "Soil your Undies" challenge and other similar initiatives around the world, focused on collecting soil data by surveying the decomposition of cotton underpants. The percentage decomposition of the cotton underwear serves as an indirect indicator of soil health and contributes to the creation of a map illustrating seasonal microbiological activity in the soil.

The second, ongoing citizen science program is called "InvestiGATE for Your Soil". This initiative continuously collects primary soil data, including pH, CaCO₃ content, soil texture, thickness of surface humic layer by easy measurement methods carried out with household tools following a strict tutorial. The aim is to build a comprehensive and diverse dataset of proxy variables, facilitating the creation of thematic soil.

In addition to the short introduction of the two initiatives, our poster will highlight innovations implemented in data collection to improve the efficiency of the data cleaning process.    Validation mechanisms have been incorporated to ensure the reliability of the collected data, contributing to the success not only of these citizen science programs but also of others.

Our poster will showcase the outcomes of these citizen science programs, featuring: 

• A thematic map illustrating soil microbiological activity in the spring of 2021, derived from over a thousand data points collected nationwide.
• A preliminary thematic map depicting key soil properties from our continually expanding database generated by the ongoing citizen science program.

Acknowledgement: This work has been carried out with the support of the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office K-131820 together with MEC N-140646.