Soil Health Guards: Citizen-science soil health observations, expert validation, and participant questionnaire data from Serbia

This record contains the de-identified data underlying the study “Participatory field-based soil health assessment in Serbia: Feasibility and validation of a multi-indicator citizen science approach.” The deposit comprises four complementary components: A citizen science soil health dataset containing parcel metadata, indicator completion information, and physical, chemical and biological soil health observations from 67 active contributors participating during 2024-2025. An expert-validation dataset containing laboratory measurements from an intentionally selected, non-random subset of 23 farmer-managed parcels. These records are linked to the corresponding citizen science observations through a de-identified parcel identifier and were used for direct, semi-quantitative and convergent validation analyses. An anonymized pre-implementation questionnaire dataset used to assess public awareness, attitudes and willingness to participate in soil citizen science activities. An anonymized post-implementation questionnaire dataset used to evaluate participant experiences, perceived simplicity and adequacy of the field citizen science methods, and reasons for incomplete experiments. The repository also contains questionnaire instruments and coded questionnaire responses. The expert-validation dataset represents a nested validation subset and should not be interpreted as an independent or population-representative soil survey. Exact parcel coordinates, direct participant identifiers and potentially identifying free-text information were excluded from the public release.