Citizen science and sustainable agriculture

Achieving goals

Citizen science has been promoted for achieving major policy goals, such as the UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals, and as a way to monitor and evaluate global policy components and goals such as zero hunger and reducing inequalities among countries. Increasing participation and engagement across the population is one way to educate citizens about sustainable development goals and create a sense of shared responsibility.

Sustainable agriculture

Sustainable agriculture can be broadly defined as farming via methods that satisfy food and production needs while remaining profitable and sustaining farmers, the environment, and natural resources. The definition of sustainable agriculture varies depending on whether it is being defined within political or scientific discourse. The global political discourse focuses on economic and social dimensions, such as food production to support the world's increasing population, with a focus on developing countries and human rights. The scientific discourse centralizes the agricultural sector and environmental management and protection within it.

Sustainable agricultural practices and technologies can help mitigate extreme climate events by meeting increasing human needs and improving the resilience and sustainability of ecosystems and natural resources. Sustainable agricultural technologies generally do not have adverse environmental impacts, improve the natural environment, are affordable and effective, and improve food production.

Fundamentals of sustainable agriculture

The following are examples of standard practices and frameworks for sustainable agriculture:

• Integrated farm management is the combination of natural and human capital to solve agricultural and environmental issues. Natural-based solutions include methods such as soil regeneration, nutrient cycling, allelopathy, and nitrogen fixation. These solutions build resilience, contribute to biodiversity, and support ecosystem services. Human capital includes farmers' skills and knowledge of agricultural practices.
• Dynamic balance requires ongoing evaluation of agricultural methods to ensure that negative environmental and socio-economic impacts are mitigated, while the benefits are maximized. This includes minimizing the use of non-renewable resources.
• Regenerative design refers to designing systems with sustainable agricultural intensification, regenerative agriculture, and a circular economy in mind. This allows for the preservation of both food security and natural resources in the long-run.
• Social development includes increasing community engagement and reducing inequities in agricultural production processes. The focus is on developing social capital and enabling equal participation in agricultural development.

Applications

Advocates for citizen science in sustainable agriculture propose that it helps increase the amount of available information and supports those who participate in the process. Citizens who participate are not academics but rather ordinary people, which offers a new view on the problems and questions being addressed. This allows researchers to identify which problems matter the most to farmers and what gaps exist in the research. The amount of data generated from these efforts expands the research pool as well.

The process integrates the public into the problems being addressed in sustainable agriculture and allows for widespread communication across participants who can share new information and techniques for dealing with related problems. Access to researchers can provide supplemental knowledge, support community members to tackle the problems they regularly face, and advises them on how to argue for changes in the political field.

Examples of citizen science in sustainable agriculture

Citizen science efforts can involve documentation, reporting, and sharing of observations for sustainable agriculture methods.

Pest and pathogen monitoring

In northern Italy, the brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomorpha halys, is an agricultural pest. A pest monitoring system was developed to engage citizens in the documentation of the brown marmorated stink bug through an app called "BugMap." Researchers were then able to identify areas most threatened by the pest through the large number of submitted citizen reports. Although the "BugMap" was user-friendly, not all geographic areas had access to mobile apps and internet connectivity, posing a limitation for web-based approaches. In another example, the documentation of invasive plant species relies on photo recognition that can produce inaccurate results when there is a lack of internet connectivity.

Climate adaptation

Extreme climate events have increased the need for crop variety in order to sustain current food systems. Crop variety testing, also known as the tricot approach, involves the observation of three different crop varieties, fertilizer types, or a combination of both to evaluate which options work best. The tricot approach recognizes that there are gender inequalities in agricultural production and attempts to involve more women in the process. This approach has shown to be successful as it engages both researchers and farmers to find solutions that are specific to various environmental areas and needs. The tricot approach was employed on multiple plots in Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and India with farmers as citizen scientists. Each country analyzed climate effects on different seed varieties allowing them to adjust in the next planting cycle. This iterative process documented the replacement of seed varieties for climate adaptation allowing results to be replicated and scalable.

Pollination

Pollinators are an important aspect of human survival as many fruits, vegetables, and plants require cross pollination for reproduction. In urban areas pollinators face habitat loss as their natural environments are disrupted by human populations. A citizen science project, called Native Bee Watch, began in urban Colorado as a way to collect data on bee morphospecies. Both citizen scientists and researchers collected comparable data that is being used as a conservation tool for bee habitats.

Limitations

There are a few challenges in integrating citizen science with sustainable agriculture. Many agriculture and food-related topics, such as nutrition, have no notable citizen science participation or research. Citizen science also most often occurs at smaller scales and the local level, so its coverage varies significantly across disciplines, geographies, and socioeconomic groups.

Farmers with smaller farms cannot contribute in the same way those with larger farms might be able to, as they may lack the resources or time to participate. There are also challenges in sustaining people's participation. Farmers have to consider the trade-offs between spending more time working versus participating in citizen science, weighing immediate needs against potential large-scale benefits. These disparities are further exacerbated by the fact that academics or researchers often need highly regulated large-scale studies for more accurate and structured data, which might only be possible in cooperation with larger farms.

Citizen science often has unequal representation in terms of demographics. Those who participate are more likely to identify as white, male, and of higher socioeconomic status. Few citizen science projects have been completed in the Global South. These are often farming-dependent countries that are more vulnerable to environmental, social, or economic issues and could benefit from these projects. Citizen science projects should evaluate whether the diversity of participants represents the broader population and if there are barriers to participation specific to different subpopulations.

These limitations mean that the findings of citizen science work in sustainable agriculture may not be as easily aggregated to the regional or national level or applied to new or different contexts.