Sebastián Ureta, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile;
Abby Kinchy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US
New Orleans 2019: Mapping / monitoring
Nuestros Suelos (Our Soil) is a research initiative looking to design, test and disseminate a toolkit for participative soil degradation assessment based on a citizen science sensibility and low-cost open hardware technologies. Aiming at extracting soil degradation in Chile from its current public oblivion, the toolkit is composed by a series of activities and devices, ranging from the production of multiple kinds of data about local soil degradation through the usage of low cost measuring devices to speculative exercises aiming at the assemblage of possible future soils for the areas under analysis. On the project is involved a multidisciplinary research team of social and natural scientists, activists and community-engagement actors. Nuestros Suelos started in Chile in July 2018, with funding from by Iniciativa Científica Milenio and FONDECYT. A second phase, with funding from NSF, including further development and testing in the US, will start in January 2020.