In response to climate change, water scarcity, and environmental pollution, urban and rural community members are gardening locally and conserving water by using rainwater harvesting systems. Communities seeking to adopt this kind of environmental stewardship have concerns regarding environmental quality (Sandhaus et al. 2018) and asked, “What is the quality of my harvested rainwater?”. In response, The University of Arizona in partnership with Sonora Environmental Research Institute, Inc. (SERI), designed Project Harvest a co-created community science project focused on, evaluating potential microbiological, organic, and inorganic (i.e., metal(loid)) pollutants in harvested rainwater, soil, and garden plants irrigated with harvested rainwater, learning outcomes, and social action (for program details, see Davis et al. 2018, 2020; Ramírez- Andreotta et al. 2020; Project Harvest n.d.). Through co-creation, Project Harvest has generated 2.5 years (2017–2020) of environmental quality data and through a communityfirst reporting model (Emmett and Desai 2010; Emmett et al. 2009) and extensive engagement and data sharing activities (Kaufmann et al. 2021; Davis et al. 2020), continues to champion placed-based topics and local experts, address community questions regarding environmental quality, inform participant decision-making, improve environmental health literacy, and link research to action in underserved Arizona communities health literacy, community (Davis et al. 2020, 2018).
Visit the Project Harvest website: https://projectharvest.arizona.edu/
National Science Foundation Award Summary: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1612554&HistoricalAwar…