Experiences of citizen science and co-creation within the activities of the Italian chapter of the LOESS project

The water engineering group of the University of Brescia is active in the Horizon Europe project LOESS (https://loess-project.eu/) since its start in June 2023, together with other nineteen European –of which two Italian– partners. The final goals of the project are to raise awareness on the importance of soil and of its functions, to increase soil literacy across Europe and to help developing innovative educational materials and practices.
To do so, we –together with the other two Italian partners– created an Italian Community of Practice (CoP) and engaged it in providing an overview of the current level of soil–related knowledge and teaching programmes and materials, in order to identify the gap between educational offer and needs amongst different levels of the society (from pupils to students to citizens). The Italian CoP, led by the University of Brescia, is composed of 60 members from both the higher education and the research community, as well as from the primary and secondary education levels (teachers and pupils), the productive sectors (farmers and spatial planners), the politics world (local administrators) and the civil society (NGOs and associations). The CoP, or various sub–groups of people from it, has been involved in multiple activities since the start of the project, and this contribution intends to report on them.
In March 2022 we launched the WormEx II experiment, an ongoing educational experiment and a citizen–based participatory research (CBPR) performed in the garden of the Liceo Copernico High School in Brescia, in view of attracting the students’ attention on the hydrological role played by macropores, by observing some aspects of earthworm digging activity.
On World Soil Day 2023 we –together with the other two Italian partners– performed a widespread infiltration experiment involving classes from 5 Primary Schools over the Italian territory, i.e. one in Lombardy, two in Emilia Romagna, one in Sicily and one in Sardinia. A total of 140 students and 7 teachers took part in the experimental phase, after which they all joined a virtual meeting where around 50 students (between 4 and 20 per school) volunteered in reporting the experiment result to the CoP, which had previously contributed in the design of the experiment itself.
Between November and December 2024 we organised and conducted three co–creation events on Augmented Reality applications for soil health education in two 3rd-year classes of a local High School in the province of Brescia. The activity produced 22 projects created with a commercial app–prototyping tool from an international project partner.
Finally on 5 December 2024 we –together with the other two Italian partners– organized and hosted a dissemination event about World Soil Day, with considerations regarding the links between soil, peace and sustainability. The public event involved two Primary School classes (one in Emilia Romagna and one in Sicily) that reported on a previously–held laboratory activity on the topic, as well as university students and professors.
These activities showed how much our society is interested in taking an active part in research if allowed.