About the project
ECHO aims to actively involve and engage citizens by building their skills. In doing so, it promotes better soil management across the EU and encourages social change through trust and a better understanding of soil.
ECHO is a citizen science project focused on the health of Europe’s soils.
This European project will develop citizen science initiatives to monitor and care for soil in every EU Member State, taking into account different soil types, land uses and associated biology.
ECHO will create ECHOREPO, a long-term, open-access data repository fed with data collected by citizens. It will be available not only to scientists but also to the general public and interested communities, adding value to existing data and to other relevant soil monitoring initiatives.
ECHO is a Research and Innovation Action co-funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe programme. Coordinated by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy, 16 organisations from across Europe, including Fundación Ibercivis, manage and develop different parts of the project.
Project objectives
The project’s main aim is to involve citizens in protecting and restoring soils, drawing on their own knowledge and helping them develop new skills to monitor and care for them.
Within this framework, ECHO has three specific objectives:
1) To spark public interest in soil health issues while raising awareness of why caring for soil matters.
2) To empower citizens through their active contribution to the project’s data collection, generating new information on the health of Europe’s soils.
3) To enable citizens to take an active role and participate directly in decision-making on soil issues, based on the knowledge they have gained. They will promote responsible soil use and encourage behaviour change across the European Union.
The role of Ibercivis
Fundación Ibercivis is involved throughout the project to ensure it has a strong impact on both science and society. It carries out citizen science activities, helps develop the digital technologies involved and oversees the project’s science outreach and communication.
One of the Foundation’s main activities in ECHO is designing citizen science strategies that make a real difference to soil monitoring. To this end, specific tools will be developed and their impact assessed, with particular attention to the quality of the data provided by participants.
Our activities
Carry out an initial literature review of earlier projects and initiatives similar to ECHO, looking at their features, the mistakes they made and the solutions they used, in order to improve the project.
Set up an initial evaluation framework, to be followed throughout the project, to make sure its objectives have been met by the time it ends.
Choose the most suitable citizen science methods in each case, since every country where they will be used is different and we need to adapt to each context.
Develop and oversee the citizen science initiatives themselves, from data collection by participants to making sure the data reach the scientific community correctly, among other tasks.
Identify the communities that will benefit most from the data generated by the project: although the data will be available to everyone, we need to make sure they reach those who will make the best use of them.
Make sure the data generated in the project are compatible with the existing databases they will complement, and help assess their quality, so that they make a significant contribution to science.
Encourage the international replication of its citizen science initiatives, so that the work continues after the project has ended.
Strengthen all the ethical aspects of the project, to ensure integrity, transparency and respect for all participants.
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