Building Citizen-Powered Agricultural Intelligence
Citizen Science for Agricultural Prosperity (CSAP) is a collaborative framework exploring how citizen science and digital tools can strengthen climate-smart agriculture, starting with priority-crop communities in Trinidad and Tobago.
By enabling communities to collect and use their own agroecological data, CSAP tests new ways to reduce risk, improve decisions, and strengthen resilience at both the environmental and farm level.
The Challenge
Agricultural communities across the Caribbean face growing pressure from climate stress, pests and diseases, rising input costs, and limited access to timely, local data. Decisions are often made with incomplete information, while valuable knowledge from farmers, communities, and researchers remains fragmented. Smallholder farmers, in particular, are excluded from the kinds of real-time intelligence that larger systems rely on, making it harder to reduce risks, protect yields, and adapt to change.
CSAP exists because these challenges are not just technical. They are systemic, and they require new ways of working together.
A Collaborative Experiment
CSAP is a collaborative experiment in how agricultural intelligence is created and shared. Rather than assuming one institution has all the answers, we bring farmers, youth, researchers, and agencies into a shared process of learning, testing, and improvement. Communities collect and use data in their own environments, researchers provide validation and insight, and digital tools connect observations into actionable knowledge.
This is not a fixed blueprint. It is a living system that evolves as participants learn what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to change.
Our Vision
We envision an agricultural system where communities actively generate the data that guides decisions affecting their livelihoods and environments. A system where local observations strengthen research, early warnings reach farmers faster, and nature-based practices are informed by real field conditions. By combining human observation, digital tools, and scientific insight, CSAP aims to strengthen productivity, resilience, and opportunity across farming communities
Flagship Initiatives
The Citizen Science Network
A growing network of farmers, youth, students, and community members trained to collect geo-referenced agricultural and environmental observations. This network builds local capacity while creating a shared foundation of trusted data
The Data Collection App
A mobile and web-based system that transforms field observations into alerts, maps, and insights. The platform supports farmers, researchers, and institutions with timely, community-generated agricultural intelligence.