Ig Nobel Prize for an Amazing Science Project Running on SPOTTERON!

Huge congratulations to the project team of Beweisstück Unterhose (in English: Slip of Evidence) for receiving the Ig-Nobel Prize! It has been a great adventure to support the project with the digital Citizen Science App toolkit running on the SPOTTERON Platform.

Simple But Effective Research Method

There are several ways how to analyse soil health. The team from Switzerland took a creative way to assess soil health by joining forces with 1000 citizens who shared a common methodology: burying and digging up cotton underpants. Citizens were adding their observations in the Beweisstück Unterhose App. The App included a soil health assessment with explanations and visual infographics that guided participants to monitor their chosen soil plot areas. Across different land management areas, from urban gardens to arable lands, the level of decay of the cotton underpants provided valuable information about soils' conditions. The results of the research have been published in Plants, People, Planet; the full article "Soil health assessment using buried cotton underpants with the help of 1000 citizen scientists" available here.

The 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony

Ig Nobel Prize is an annual celebration of public engagement projects that include scientific research. As described in the Scientific Journal Nature: "the awards highlight weird, funny and improbable research that also makes you think". The award ceremony this year took place in Switzerland and was livestreamed online. The project Beweisstück Unterhose was awarded under the Soil Science category. From the project team, UZH Professor Marcel van der Heijden, shared that they were very surprised and also honored to receive the prize. 

SPOTTERON Team is thrilled to have been part of this engaging research and happy to see that Citizen Science project is part of the Ig Nobel Prize laureates.