Pooper Snooper vs SoilPlastic

Welcome to Pooper Snooper, a project that seeks to empower people to tackle a messy problem. Dog waste is a significant problem in the UK and across the globe. There are approximately 8.5 million dogs in the UK alone with roughly 25% of all households currently owning a dog. And with each dog needing to defecate up to 5 times every day that could mean a staggering 42.5 million dog poops per day that need to be dealt with. Many dog owners are responsible and clean up after their pooch but we all know that too many are not as socially responsible, leading to the pollution of environments that are there for all us to enjoy and share. Not only an inconvenience, dog poo also poses substantial health risks to humans (particular young children) and to animals including commercially important livestock. Pooper Snooper lets you highlight the problem of dog fouling wherever you are and puts dog fouling on the map! The app also allows you to record and find the location of bins so that it’s easier than ever to find where to dispose of your doggy deposits.

Plastic use has facilitated many practices in agriculture in the past decades. However, the increased application leads to aggregations of plastic in the fields in various contents. From the different plastic debris micro-, and nano-plastics (MNP) are derived and are small enough to be ingested by a wide range of organisms and can cross biological barriers at nano-scale and enter plant systems. This emerging risk has prompted first studies that confirmed the high potential of accumulation of MP in soils causing changes in physico-chemical soil properties. Consequently, this can cause alternation of soil functions such as soil water dynamics and ultimately affect related ecosystem services (ESS) like nutrient cycling, plant growth, and soil biodiversity, which have unmeasured impacts on the economy of the farm. These effects could be even magnified with the presence of MP in combination of other soil pollutants, such as pesticides and veterinary drugs or plastic additives (e.g. dyes), potentially exhibiting synergistic effects. Within the EU research project ‘Minagris’ these interactive mechanisms are explored and documented. This App /’SoilPlastic’ motivates and engages various stakeholders to contribute to this process by observing and documenting plastic residues/littering in and on soils, submitting anonymized content to a global database. The aim is to identify needs, improve farmer and citizen awareness, provide practitioners with scientifically sound guidance on the impact of different plastic uses and inputs on soil ecosystems – enabling them to make informed decisions – and joint development of novel strategies for reducing plastic contamination. Additionally, with the observed data, a better understanding of any potentially harmful impacts of plastic debris to soil functions, soil biodiversity, related ESS, agricultural productivity at the field level, and related socio-economic consequences at farm level is provided. The App is running on the SPOTTERON Citizen Science Platform at www.spotteron.net