The GROW Observatory: Empowering citizens through collaborative earth observation data and knowledge

The GROW Observatory will create a citizen platform and community to generate, share and utilise information on land, soil and water resource at a resolution hitherto not previously considered. The vision is to underpin smart and sustainable custodianship of land and soil, whilst meeting the demands of food production, and to answer a longstanding challenge for space science, namely the validation of soil moisture detection from satellites. GROW will place the burning issues of a specific community of interest at the centre of the project from the very start. Low cost but high power consumer sensing technology, and an easy to use Soil Testing Kit, lower barriers to entry. A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) facilitates the scaling of rigorous citizen observation, while engagement is underpinned by storytelling and community champions. A campaignbased approach engages citizens, scientists and policy makers to co-design coordinated sampling operations around particular needs and issues.