A brand new project in Dundee, which has social design at its heart, is challenging people to get involved in massive experiments that will collect data and build knowledge on growing plants and conserving soil.
GROW is led by a team at the University of Dundee UK, with partners all over the UK – including Manchester, London, Brighton, Exeter and across Europe, from Barcelona in Spain and Rome in Italy to Ameersfoot in the Netherlands.
Eighteen different organisations are involved, aiming to involve thousands of growers from across Europe in helping to gather data and use that data to improve the way we grow food. .
The overall concept of GROW is to support masses of ordinary people to become better growers and citizen scientists; generating sharing and using information and knowledge about growing and the land. This knowledge will allow people to make better decisions about, for example, what to grow, how much of it to plant and when the soil needs more help to replenish. In turn, this will lead to more sustainable land use practices, smarter soil and land governance and policy, and a unique data repository for science.
In a nutshell GROW will help citizen growers (e.g. small or family farm, allotment, garden, park or waste ground) to understand and manage land better.
GROW has the ambitious goal to deliver a change in Citizen Observation (science by masses of people) by moving it into the mainstream, and from a model where everybody just gives knowledge, to a model where people share knowledge. By bringing together many of the leading players across Europe’s digital community, the environmental science community and those experts in citizen science, this project aims to create a network that will eventually lead to some real changes to the climate change policy makers.
We’re aiming to to engage 20,000 citizens across Europe to participate in the programme, and we’re looking to engage with a million people who would access our information, share targets and knowledge. In the future, we envision GROW extending beyond EU borders with huge impact in the developing world.
We’ve got some ambitious targets for the GROW project – we want to change the way people across Europe manage land and grow food. We hope to see sustainable micro-farming, diversification and self-sufficiency being much more widely practised than today and as a result, land use is more sustainable and soil degradation has slowed significantly.
By the end of the three year project, we want to see thousands more people growing their own food, protecting and building healthier soils. Our information will help make decisions on soil and land use policy much smarter and citizens are actively engaged in informing land and soil policy and use.
On a wider scale, we hope that lives will be saved through the application of improved models that predict heat waves and help mitigate the impact of severe climate events.
We hope that citizen observatory data is a standard and vital part of environmental monitoring and is a key component part of Global Earth Observation. A key point for us would be that the 18 organisations behind GROW are still collaborating, some driving forward the observatory beyond the funding period into a highly successful entity and others developing and providing complementary services.
At the moment, we’re still in a planning stage. We’ll launch our first campaign on 1st May, which will be targeted at local growers – some in Dundee, some across Scotland and throughout Europe.
If you’d like to get involved, sign up at the website, www.growobservatory.org or follow us on twitter: @growobservatory
Deborah Long is Programme Director of Grow.
