As winter sets in over Punjab, one can hear the humdrum of hundreds of machines harvesting rice across lakhs of hectares of paddy fields. In Maharashtra, villages in Vidarbha lug their snowy cotton harvest to the market. Years ago, these landscapes were a sprawling array of forests, grasslands, wetlands and multiple crops cultivated on a shifting basis.

Researchers from Biodiversity International and collaborators from Norway, Nicaragua, Italy, Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Honduras, Germany, and India have described how participation of farmers as citizen scientists can help to address this challenge.