CURIOSOIL: Join us to raise awareness and curiosity about soils!

Soil health plays a crucial role in ecosystem functioning and is closely linked to human life. However, land and soil degradation are widespread due to environmental and anthropogenic threats. Soil knowledge is essential to address modern global challenges. Despite the important role of soils, they are often underappreciated by the general population, highlighting the need to raise soil awareness. The EU project CURIOSOIL (2024-2028, co-funded by the European Union: URL: curiosoil.eu) therefore aims at raising soil literacy and promoting a positive narrative around soils. CURIOSOIL focuses on enhancing soil literacy by triggering soil curiosity and connections between society and soil. According to the EU Mission Soil Implementation plan, soil literacy refers to both awareness about the importance of soil and practice-oriented knowledge related to achieving soil health. Soil literacy and education are crucial to environmental sustainability and the future of societies.

With this poster contribution, we seek to explore to what extent university students and scientists at EGU are willing to reflect on their own attitudes and behaviors toward soils using a participatory approach. We hypothesize that participating in discussions and reflection exercises about soil helps to increase awareness, spark curiosity, and encourage action to solve soil-related issues. We therefore invite conference participants to actively engage with us through our participatory poster. The participants are invited to answer targeted questions, write down and display their reflections directly on the poster, via post-its and/or via a digital survey. These questions are aligned with learning objectives and competences of soil literacy related to knowledge, attitudes and behavior towards soil.  All collected information will be anonymized to ensure privacy and confidentiality. To the best of our knowledge, this participatory approach is new to soil science as usually data are presented and not collected during a soil science conference. We therefore also aim to introduce the participatory poster as a research tool for data collection. Additionally, it serves as a communication instrument to encourage reflection on individual perspectives towards soil and promote an active role of raising soil awareness in society.

Specifically, our objectives are to: 1) collaboratively (the presenter and conference participants together) reflect on our knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors including emotions and habits related to soils, 2) discuss factors that influence our connection with soils (or lack thereof), 3) brainstorm on ways to create formal and informal environments that improve awareness, curiosity and learning about soils. Our findings will be used to design CURIOSOIL educational materials that will be made available for free on the project website (curiosoil.eu).

In summary, we believe that our participatory approach can enhance soil awareness, curiosity and learning. We intend to bridge the gap between society and soils to encourage careful and sustainable soil use and protect soil health. Moreover, our participatory approach is designed to engage scientists, foster multidisciplinary collaborations between social and natural scientists towards co-creation of educational materials, as well as to contribute meaningfully to natural science research.