Fig 1.
Recruitment, participation and engagement in the #60minworms survey.
The key mobilisation routes were through Twitter and Farmers Weekly, the survey attracted participants with no earthworm monitoring experience and the primary feedback preference was a workshop.
Table 1.
The interpretation framework is based on the presence of earthworms for each observation (one soil pit) across a field (10 soil pits).
Fig 2.
Usefulness of the #60minworms survey to farmers.
Feedback included trust, value and satisfaction in the protocol by participants (100% would do the test again) and an extremely high interest (>85%) in community science (including other participants and scientists) with a key use in comparing results.
Fig 3.
#60minworms survey participation.
There was a broad geographic spread over England and a range of field management practices. There was little indication of bias in sampling strategy, problems in compliance or results quality, but there was a key training need in terms of earthworm identification skills.
Fig 4.
Trade-offs between earthworm fieldwork effort (30–240 mins) and data quality, farmer participation levels and labour costs.