This monumental statistical work represented a methodological milestone: in order to thoroughly understand the geographical, demographic, and economic reality of its towns, the direct knowledge of local authorities and their neighbors was utilized. An early example of massive community-based data collection.

Introduction. Between 1574 and 1582, the monarchy of Philip II promoted an exceptional initiative to better understand its territories: the Topographical Relations, which managed to gather information from hundreds of localities in the central and southern peninsula. Although its scope was partial, its value was enormous because information was collected from hundreds of towns, many of them small, offering an image that was very difficult to obtain through other means. That initiative was born as a governance tool, but today it can also be seen as a historical antecedent of a central idea in citizen science: knowledge about a territory is not only produced from the center, but also by those who inhabit and build it.

The preserved corpus. According to documentary indexes, 8 manuscript volumes, 4,321 folios, and 721 Relations corresponding to 635 towns are preserved. Recent studies on biodiversity have worked with 637 Relations or with data from 628 localities, extracting thousands of records on plants, wild animals, crops, and livestock.

“Intelligent and curious” people. The responses were organized through specific questionnaires and instructions sent from the royal authority. In each locality, the councils had to appoint at least two “intelligent and curious” people, capable of providing “complete and true” information about the town and its land. Experienced neighbors, council members, witnesses, elderly people, scribes, and those who possessed memory, direct observation, or practical knowledge of the place participated. In many cases, scribes collected answers from people who did not know how to write.

An archive of local observations. The questionnaires asked about population, jurisdiction, local history, economy, roads, waters, forests, crops, livestock, climate, health, architecture, customs, religion, and natural resources. For this reason, the Relations are not just an administrative source: they are also an archive of local knowledge about the landscape, the economy, and daily life in the 16th century.

Why are the Topographical Relations a reference in citizen science?

• Situated knowledge. The relations show that those who inhabit a territory possess essential information to describe and understand it.
• Guided data collection. The letters, instructions, and questionnaires functioned as a common methodology to record information in an orderly manner.
• Local contributions. The work was built with data, observations, and descriptions coming from hundreds of localities.
• Scientific value. Almost 500 years later, the Relations are reused to study historical landscapes, crops, fauna, flora, and biodiversity.
• An open tension. While the initiative originated from the monarchy and had a governance purpose, it also reflects that an institution can request data from people distributed throughout the territory, and that those contributions can entail lasting scientific knowledge.

Did you know…? Based on the Topographical Relations, recent studies have gathered more than 7,300 records on plants, wild animals, crops, and livestock, with references to at least 225 species. Responses written almost five centuries ago still help today to reconstruct historical biodiversity.

REFERENCES

Clavero, M., & Revilla, E. (2014). Biodiversity data: Mine centuries-old citizen science. Nature, 510, 35. https://doi.org/10.1038/510035c

Campos y Fernández de Sevilla, F. J. (2003). Las Relaciones Topográficas de Felipe II: Índices, fuentes y bibliografía. Anuario Jurídico y Económico Escurialense, 36, 439–574. Ed. digital 2010: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes / BNE. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmcs75z7

Sanz García, F., Pelacho, M., Woods, T., Fraisl, D., See, L., Haklay, M., & Arias, R. (2021). Finding what you need: A guide to citizen science guidelines. In K. Vohland, A. Land-Zandstra, L. Ceccaroni, R. Lemmens, J. Perelló, M. Ponti, R. Samson, & K. Wagenknecht (Eds.), The Science of Citizen Science (pp. 419–437). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58278-4_21

Viana, D. S., Blanco-Garrido, F., Delibes, M., & Clavero, M. (2022). A 16th-century biodiversity and crop inventory. Ecology, 103(10), e3783. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3783

La entrada The Topographical Relations of Philip II (1574–1582): Local knowledge to describe a territory se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.

A healthy soil is a natural, non-renewable, highly dynamic, and complex resource. Although soil degradation is a natural process, anthropogenic pressure associated with intensive agricultural production, urban developments, and climate change has accelerated and intensified it. Minimizing or reversing this trend requires transformative changes, mainly related to land use and management, which can be driven by all sectors of society.

One of the greatest existing limitations when addressing soil degradation is the limited information and public awareness about it and its social importance. This is why citizen science initiatives offer a dual response to this challenge. On one hand, they contribute to soil science because they allow the monitoring of its health, and on the other hand, these participatory practices allow for knowledge transfer, literacy, and the development of the participants’ skills. Furthermore, the generated data returns to these communities in the form of open science, so it benefits not only the scientific communities.

ECHO is a citizen science project focused on the health of European soils that offers this participatory approach for its research. It belongs to one of the 5 Horizon Europe Missions for the year 2030: the Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe” (also called Soil Mission), whose objective is to “provide concrete solutions to the challenges posed by soil degradation and achieve healthy soils across Europe by 2030 through launching, demonstrating, and accelerating the transition towards sustainable soil management practices.” ECHO contributes to this, having its own goal of analyzing, developing, and validating participatory approaches for citizen involvement in soil science. It also aims to demonstrate the integration of citizen science data into existing platforms, such as the European Soil Data Centre, which increases its utility.

Since the beginning of the project in June 2023, its material and citizen science activities were co-designed with the first participants in the role of Ambassadors, and have been put into practice in the first nine national initiatives of ECHO (in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Germany, Poland, Romania, Scotland, and Finland), which have lasted from May 2025 until now. The strategies followed in these first countries are being reproduced in the twenty remaining European countries, where citizen science initiatives are active from February to November 2026.

In all ECHO initiatives, an extensive network of Ambassadors has been created to act as local facilitators of citizen participation, together with the coordinating entities of each national initiative. They have been in charge of recruiting citizen scientists, have organized group soil sampling days, and have facilitated local project activities. They thus extend the reach of each initiative to a wider audience and have brought great value to the project. The citizen scientists, in turn, actively contribute to data collection and soil analysis, participating in local field activities and conducting soil sampling, in-situ measurements, and taking samples for subsequent laboratory analysis.

The Ibercivis Foundation has been the coordinating entity of the ECHO national initiative in Spain, where we have created a solid group of approximately 40 Ambassadors, out of the more than 420 across the nine countries. These people have regularly participated in Ibercivis meetings and activities to manage local initiatives and, for their part, have organized and coordinated up to 35 activities. These activities, mostly focused on raising public awareness of the project to motivate their involvement, have ranged from oral presentations at conferences to workshops and group sampling days that, above all, allowed for a better understanding of the ECHO sampling protocol. All this has resulted in more than 650 samples being taken in Spain, in different biogeographical points of the region where diverse uses and types of soil exist: from agricultural, forestry, industrial, or urban soils. These samples have been taken by, at least, the same number of citizen scientists, since many of them have been taken in larger groups.

To date, more than 6,000 soil samples have been taken across Europe within the framework of the ECHO project. Each sample covers the eight soil health indicators established by the Soil Mission: plant cover, forest cover and landscape heterogeneity, biodiversity in terms of earthworms and microbial diversity, presence of contaminants, heavy metals and nutrients, soil structure and texture, organic matter content, and pH. The use of these standardized indicators, which have been widely tested and are extensively used worldwide, contributes to the homogenization of soil monitoring in Europe and ensures its correct integration into other monitoring programs such as LUCAS. The results of each ECHO soil sample are accessible to the general public from the ECHOREPO platform, which allows downloading for those individuals who have participated in the sampling and allows all interested citizens to be informed. Furthermore, this repository contributes to the scientific use of its data by university students, specialized non-profit groups, or soil science research groups for a deeper analysis of general soil health in Europe.

ECHO continues to seek citizen participation and incorporate new soil samples in twenty European countries (France, Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, Czechia, Slovakia, Luxembourg, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). In this way, the project aims to improve soil literacy, facilitate the co-production of knowledge between citizens and the scientific community, and foster more environmentally friendly soil management, offering a replicable approach across Europe.

The project ECHO – Engaging citizens in soil science: the road to healthier soils is funded by the European Union (GA No 101112869) and co-funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) (GA No 10068004).

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Long before the term “citizen science” was coined at the end of the 20th century, there were countless women and men in our country who collected data, mapped territories, recorded meteorological observations, classified plants or sustained entire scientific expeditions from a practical, local and committed knowledge. Without academic or nominal recognition in many cases. Without more infrastructure than their rigor, their network of contacts and their notebook in many others.

This series of publications is a journey through some of those antecedents. Not to rewrite history, but to place what we do today in a longer tradition: that of those who approached science and its construction as common goods.

We will cover eleven milestones, from the 16th century to the beginning of the 21st century:

• The Topographical Relations of Philip II (16th century), a work of territorial knowledge built with local contributions.
• Isabel Zendal (18th–19th century), a key nurse in the first global vaccination campaign.
• Pascual Madoz (19th century), coordinator of a vast work of territorial knowledge prepared with local contributions.
• Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola (19th century), a naturalist who defended the prehistoric origin of the paintings of Altamira against official rejection.
• Blanca Catalán de Ocón (19th century), naturalist, the first Spanish woman recognized by official botany.
• The Secondary Climatological Network (1911), the first great climatological network of volunteer observers in Spain.
• The Astronomical Society of Spain and America (1911), a community of observers for tracking celestial bodies and phenomena.
• The collaboration between the Spanish Institute of Oceanography and the fishermen’s guilds (20th century), exchange of data and mutual support between marine science and local knowledge.
• The Aranzadi Science Society (1947), an associative scientific community dedicated to the knowledge and protection of natural and cultural heritage.
• Francisco Bernis (20th century), zoologist, promoter of participatory ornithology, founder of the Spanish Ornithological Society.
• Javier Blasco Zumeta (20th–21st century), teacher, coordinator of an international network that identified thousands of species and revealed nearly 200 new ones.

Credits to AEMET for the image.
Launching of kites and observation balloons in the waters of Tenerife in 1905 from the “Princesse Alice”, the yacht of Prince Albert of Monaco, an enthusiastic patron of atmospheric research. The character is the German meteorologist Hugo Hergesell, a great promoter of aerological studies.

Each story responds to the same question about what this figure or this initiative teaches us as relevant examples of what we call citizen science today.

Part One: Philip II’s Topographical Reports (1574–1582): Local knowledge used to describe a territory

La entrada Before it was called ‘citizen science’ se publicó primero en Fundación Ibercivis.