AGES

The Agency for Health and Food Safety GmbH (AGES) is a company of the Republic of Austria and was founded on 1 June 2002.

AGES runs its own citizen science projects, such as the project "Tea Bag Index", in which experiments on the decomposition process in soil are conducted with the help of tea bags in order to better understand the global CO2 cycle. With this tea bag method, even lay people around the world can make a valuable contribution to science and the environment: they simply bury tea bags in the ground, dig them up again after a while and weigh them. The weight loss indicates how much plant material, in this case tea, has been decomposed. This simple and cheap method for determining decomposition rates has been scientifically proven. With these experiments, comparable data can be obtained worldwide, especially from regions for which no corresponding information is available so far. On the project's website you can find more information about this project.

In addition, AGES in cooperation with the Citizen Science Network Austria as well as the FWF (Austrian Science Fund) organized the Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2017. Under the motto "Expanding Horizons" more than 200 scientists met from 2-4 March 2017 to learn about the latest developments in and around Citizen Science in Austria and around the world.