Soil Kitchen: A Cross-Institutional Mechanism for Community Engagement and Citizen-Science Centered Around the Urban Soil Resource.

The growing significance of urban agriculture and locally sourced food across the United States has increased public interest in urban soils. In many urban areas, this has created a strong demand for information on basic soil properties and contaminant distributions. Here, we describe a framework for community engagement events that we call "Soil Kitchen".  Soil Kitchen events were adapted from a 4-day 2011 Philadelphia, PA project by Future Farmers which included free soil screening for lead via portable X-Ray Fluorescence (pXRF), along with other basic soil properties. Samples brought to Soil Kitchen events by citizens are coarsely geolocated (pins on maps, block or nearest intersection), and provide a foundation on which to build and visualize a growing database of screening information that is fundamentally based on citizen-science. Since 2011, four annual 2-day events in Philadelphia have resulted in a total of more than 500 samples screened for heavy metals, nutrients and texture. By creating an annual venue where people who are concerned with soil contaminants can replicate measurements yearly, various methods for mitigation can be monitored annually.  In 2015, Soil Kitchen events were initiated in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area (Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN) and were received with tremendous enthusiasm and broad interest from community groups, local municipalities, and state agencies. Soil Kitchen events provide an established, low-cost model for community engagement and citizen science centered around the urban soil resource, as well as major research opportunities which cross disciplinary and institutional interests in urban areas. With expanding interest in urban soil and urban agriculture across the country, we envision the formation of a national collaborative and encourage all soil and earth science researchers to consider adapting the Soil Kitchen model in their community.