OPAL Soil Centre

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The OPAL Soil Centre is one of five centres under the Open Air Laboratories Network (OPAL). It is based at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy and works with partners such as the Environment Agency, the British Geological Survey and the Natural History Museum. The centre created the OPAL Soil and Earthworm Survey, a national citizen science project launched in March 2009 with support from Steve Leonard and Chris Packham.

The survey invites people to visit any place with soil—gardens, parks, fields—and record information about the habitat, the soil, and to count and identify earthworms. Participants upload their results to the OPAL website, where they appear on a map with other results. The centre analyzes the data to map soils and earthworms across England and to study how human activity affects soils. The project was featured on The One Show on 23 March 2009. Led by Dr Nick Voulvoulis, the centre coordinates an England-wide soil and earthworm survey to support research into soil quality, pollution and the health of people and ecosystems, including how waste and land management practices affect soils.