Abstract

Climate adaptation requires farmers to adjust their crop varieties over time and use the right varieties to minimize climate risk. Generating variety recommendations for farmers working in marginal, heterogeneous environments requires variety evaluation under farm conditions. On-farm evaluation is difficult to scale with conventional methods. We used a scalable approach to on-farm participatory variety evaluation using crowdsourced citizen science, assigning small experimental tasks to many volunteering farmers. We generated a unique dataset from 12,409 trial plots in Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and India, a participatory variety evaluation dataset of large size and scope. We show the potential of crowdsourced citizen science to generate insights into variety adaptation, recommend adapted varieties, and help smallholder farmers respond to climate change.