By Alba Peiro
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).