TALLHEDA Citizen Science Protocol Featured at Citizen Science Lighthouse!

Smart Agro Hub today announced the publication of the TALLHEDA Standardised Protocol for Citizen Science in Digital Agriculture on the Citizen Science Lighthouse, the official digital platform of the European Citizen Science community operated under the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA).

The publication marks a significant milestone in the TALLHEDA project's open science commitment, making the protocol freely and permanently accessible to citizen science practitioners, researchers, educators, policymakers, and agricultural communities across Europe and beyond.

The Citizen Science Lighthouse serves as the European reference point for citizen science resources, enabling organisations to create and share profiles of citizen science projects, tools, training materials, and resources relevant to the field. Its mission is to build and promote a sustainable platform and mutual learning space providing different tools, best practice examples, and relevant scientific outcomes, made accessible to different stakeholders ranging from interested citizens and scientific institutions through to politicians and public media, in order to mainstream citizen science in Europe. By publishing on this platform, TALLHEDA's protocol enters the European canon of peer-recognised citizen science methodologies — alongside contributions from Horizon Europe missions, national citizen science initiatives, and leading research institutions.

The TALLHEDA Standardised Protocol for Citizen Science in Digital Agriculture provides a comprehensive, replicable, and inclusive methodological framework for citizen-led data collection in agricultural settings. Developed collaboratively by the full TALLHEDA consortium over the course of the project, the protocol covers field data collection procedures, metadata standards, multi-layered quality assurance and validation, training and capacity building frameworks, ethical and inclusive participation principles, and governance mechanisms for continuous improvement. It is designed to be adaptable across different agricultural contexts, digital infrastructure levels, and participant profiles — from university students and agronomists to smallholder farmers and rural communities in widening regions of Europe.

The European Citizen Science community is committed to pushing modern science towards open science as its modus operandi by providing open collaborative spaces where citizen scientists can familiarise with the concept of open and FAIR data with open and FAIR tools and get actively engaged, while connecting with existing e-infrastructures such as EOSC. The publication of the TALLHEDA protocol in this environment directly fulfils these principles: the protocol is openly accessible, documented to FAIR standards, and designed to support interoperability with existing citizen science and digital agriculture data infrastructures across the European Research Area.

Angeliki Milioti, EU Projects Manager at Smart Agro Hub and TALLHEDA's Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation Manager, commented: "Publishing this protocol on the Citizen Science Lighthouse is not just a dissemination milestone — it is a statement of intent. We have built something that we believe is genuinely useful beyond TALLHEDA, and we want it to reach the practitioners, educators, and policymakers who can put it to work. Greece has significant untapped potential in citizen science for digital agriculture, and this protocol is our contribution to closing that gap."

The protocol is accessible here.