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Project abstracts:

“Evaluating soil quality in Chicago community and school gardens” will aid community and school garden programs in Chicago by offering them educational materials, soil quality evaluations based on testing in their gardens, and demonstrations in an effort to keep lead in their gardens at levels that do not harm human health or plant productivity. Chicago has more than 50 urban agricultural projects, many of which provide a source of local, sustainable food for city-dwellers. While the gardens provide so many benefits, they may be at risk of lead pollution. This project will test the soil of approximately 10 different such projects for lead with a chemical analysis of soil and a lettuce bioassay. We will use the different methods for testing lead in order to compare them and determine which is the most meaningful and easy to use. Involved gardeners will be given tailored information about how to improve their soil at the end of the project and invited to a meeting to discuss the results with gardeners across the city. Project results will be evaluated based on completion of soil recommendations, educational materials, and a scientific paper.We will also evaluate participation of gardeners at the final meeting and have the involved gardeners and teachers complete surveys. Project outcomes will help users of city gardens by giving them the information they need to improve their soil, and possibly increase productivity/profitability.

“Using information technology to address soil quality in community gardens” seeks to provide educational resources to underserved communities regarding soil quality and the serious issue of lead pollution, which is a greater threat to poorer communities. We will evaluate community use of informatics tools to enhance Chicago community gardeners’ science literacy and access to resources. This includes evaluation of the usefulness of an online training module created for urban agriculturalists and the evaluation of how community informatics tools can be integrated with traditional on-site soil evaluations and demonstrations. Efforts to develop e-content will consider two audiences: educators (teachers, garden coordinators and master gardeners), who are likely to use the resources to support their educational programs, and individual users who will access content asynchronously. Part of this project will evaluate differences in the needs and skill sets of different user audiences.