GROW Observatory

The GROW Observatory (GROW) is a European-wide project engaging thousands of growers, scientists and others passionate about the land. We will discover together, using simple tools to better manage soil and grow food, while contributing to vital scientific environmental monitoring.

Why is there a GROW Observatory?

There are many human and environmental challenges facing us today.

Two challenges that GROW is focusing on are saving our soils and adapting to climate change. By helping people understand and improve both soil and food growing practices, by contributing soil moisture data over a large geographical scale – and overall by helping empower people to work on these topics collaboratively – we can aid climate science, impact on policy, and make a difference in our own actions. This means we can help respond to the crucial sustainability challenges the planet faces.

How is GROW going to do this?

Take action in growing spaces wherever those are and join learning experiences online.

Across Europe, hundreds and then thousands of growers will learn together on GROW website and online platform FutureLearn, and take action in growing spaces wherever they are, locally and across Europe. They will get to try out exciting new ways to improve their soil and food production methods. Participants do simple, coordinated soil experiments to capture and make sense of data on their local environment. This helps validate good local growing practices and international environmental monitoring.

IAAC is developing and testing new open source tools based on the Smart Citizen Kit to support citizens across europe to monitoring soil quality. This tools are being co-created with the collaboration of local gardening communities in a series of workshops hosted at Fab Lab Barcelona and Valldaura Green Fab Lab.

To learn more about this project visit growobservatory.org

Partners