Research project
The GROW Observatory: empowering European food growers to monitor soil moisture
Soil moisture plays a key role in predicting the extreme weather events that are becoming increasingly common in a changing climate. Our vision is supporting a movement of citizens generating, sharing and using information to improve their soil management, and food production.
Completed
January 2016
January 2019
Funding
Funders
The European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (No 690199)
In a changing climate, changes in soil moisture are affecting food production across Europe. Monitoring soil moisture can help us to better predict, mitigate and adapt to these changes.
We led a consortium of partners in a large-scale Citizens’ Observatory, that has empowered people to take action on soils and climate across Europe. We provided over 20,000 participants worldwide with online training courses in soil moisture monitoring, placing 6,500 soil moisture sensors in 24 GROW Places across geographic and climatic zones across the European Union. Communities gathered and used the data for themselves to understand and respond to their local environments. This also helped us to ground-truth the next generation of Copernicus satellites, Sentinel-1, to improve the accuracy of predictions on extreme events, such as flood, drought and wildfire as well as develop and test a soil moisture model to support climate change mitigation and adaptation across Europe.
The project was awarded the ‘Soil and Land Management Award’ (2019) from the British Academy of Soil Science, ‘Project of the year’ (2020) at the Stephen Fry Awards for Excellence in Public Engagement, and our workshop ‘Design for Climate Services: A Co-Design Approach’ received a Top III Award at the Academy for Design Innovation Management Conference 2019 (ADIM2019).
Outputs
Woods, M., Ajates, R., Gulari, N., Burton, V.J., van der Velden, N.K., Hemment, D. (2019). GROW Observatory: Mission outcomes.
KovácsK. Z., Hemment D., Woods M., Velden N. K. van der, Xaver A., Giesen R. H., Burton V. J., Garrett N. L., Zappa L., Long D., Dobos E. and Skalsky R. (2019) “Citizen observatory based soil moisture monitoring – the GROW example”, Hungarian Geographical Bulletin, 68(2), pp. 119-139. doi: 10.15201/hungeobull.68.2.2.
Woods, M., Balestrini, M., Bejtullahu, S., Bocconi, S., Boerwinkel, G., Boonstra, M., ... Seiz, G. (2018). Citizen Sensing: A Toolkit. Making Sense. https://doi.org/10.20933/100001112
People
External team members
FutureEverything
CulturePolis
Thingful
HydroLogic
Met Office
Starlab
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Permaculture Association Britain
University of Miskolc
StoryThings
The Forest Trust
Cultivate
The James Hutton Institute
Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)
Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IaAC)
TU Wien
University of Edinburgh