Open Soil Atlas_ACTION 2021

Open Soil Atlas will be an open source co-learning centre for Berlin.

Via an educational website, citizens will become experts on soil quality and fertility and are empowered to improve soil quality. Workshops will teach citizens how to make observations, test soil, interpret results and draw conclusions.

Citizens’ observations of soil quality data will generate a high-resolution soil quality map.

We envision that the relationship between healthy soils and healthy communities is better recognised. City decision makers will be able to better identify suitable areas for urban gardening, urban forests and areas in need of remediation.

Our research & data collection process can be replicated and expanded worldwide, in order to engage different communities and spread the analysis to new and different sites all over the world.

The Feld Food Forest soil care team has researched soil analysis & soil regeneration techniques.Through workshops and meetings with experts, we have been learning how
to share knowledge about soil and permaculture.

The Feld Food Forest project was launched in September 2019. The idea of the Open Soil Atlas was germinated as a solution to some problems we were facing at Feld Food Forest -like the lack of information about the quality of the in our area of interest- and the wish of getting our hands dirty and starting site analysis.

Soil analysis is necessary to design a regenerative edible landscape.

Our action model is based on the Theory of Change methodology.

The Feld Food Forest community has developed a framework for efficient cooperation, which ensures transparency, inclusiveness, and accountability.

Our co-creation techniques are inspired by sociocracy, a system that we are deepening together in order to improve collective action.

Our Specific Onboarding- and Outreaching Strategies have grown the Feld food forest community to more than 80 people within Berlin and beyond.

At the end of the ACTION Accelerator, the Open Soil Atlas aims at having a wide set of data and information about the soil in the Berlin area. The high-resolution soil map and the related findings will support us and other urban ecology initiatives in the dialogue with policymakers, city makers, and urban planners.

Open Soil Atlas’s virtual co-learning center will provide reliable and easily accessible knowledge to allow citizen scientists, gardeners, and sustainability practitioners to understand the quality of the soil and, eventually, implement remediation techniques - engaging them in a co-learning and knowledge sharing process, building community and citizen engagement.