On 22 October, Ibercivis organised the last annual General Assembly of the European project ECHO, devoted to citizen participation in soil science.
With more than 10,000 soil samples collected across Europe, the project is entering its last seven months. In Spain, around 75% of the kits distributed have already been used.
ECHO, which focuses on involving citizens in soil science, started in June 2023 and ends in May 2027. The General Assembly was part of the annual consortium meeting that Ibercivis hosted in Zaragoza from 21 to 23 October.
The venue was the Centre for Innovation, Training and Research in Educational Sciences (CIFICE) of the University of Zaragoza. Representatives of the partners from Italy, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Finland, Romania and Poland travelled there, while other organisations, such as those from Scotland, followed the meeting online.
The assembly took the whole day. Partners reviewed the main pending tasks of each work package still under way and, above all, analysed the status and impact of the project’s citizen science initiatives, each of them linked to a European country. They also discussed the next steps for the coming months and held a workshop to identify possible improvements for this kind of project.
The project in Spain
In Spain, the project is progressing well. 1,320 sampling kits have been distributed and 995 samples have been collected, already available in the ECHOREPO repository, of which 983 have been sent to the laboratories. This means that around 75% of the kits have been used, a high figure given that in citizen science it is usually between 50% and 60%, and one that may still rise when sampling ends. Behind these figures lie the commitment of the participating people and groups and the work of managing the activities.
The laboratories are working to speed up the analysis of the samples. Results for heavy metals and nutrients take less time, while DNA extraction and sequencing takes longer, partly because it is carried out in different laboratories.