Project hub

A new nutrient management platform for farmers, regional authorities and advisers will assist them to systematically optimise nutrient management across different agricultural production systems and regions in the EU. Designed by the EU-funded NutriBudget project, the Nutriplatform is a decision-support tool. It will be tested and used by at least 40 000 farmers across Europe. Firstly, the development of the Nutriplatform will be based on the algorithms of two advanced, newly developed, holistic Nutrimodels. These will quantify the impact of agronomic mitigation measures to optimise nutrient budget and flow across scales and by looking at various agronomic and environmental targets.

Biological organisms, including the smallest, can play a big role in restoring polluted environments. They remove or neutralise an environmental pollutant from soil or water in a process called bioremediation. The EU-funded Nymphe project will take this process to a new level. Specifically, it will develop bioremediation/revitalisation strategies based on the assembly of systems of available and new biologics (enzymes, microorganisms, bivalves and earthworms, plants and their holobiont) developed and applied on matrices from different EU contaminated sites (groundwater, sediments, wastewater, industrial and agricultural soils). The project will target at least 90 % removal of plastics and pesticides in agricultural soil and chlorinated solvents/total petroleum hydrocarbon in groundwater and sediments of industrial sites.

Healthy wetlands have a remarkable capacity to store carbon, being the most effective carbon sinks on our planet. However, human-impacted wetlands represent a major source of greenhouse gases. The EU-funded RESTORE4Cs project will assess how the restoration of degraded wetlands can help halt greenhouse gas emissions and even reverse them while improving the condition of its habitats and species and the provision of ecosystem services, in addition to providing co-benefits to stakeholders in and around the wetlands. Bringing together 16 partners from across Europe, the project will design standardised methodologies and approaches for the prioritisation of wetland restoration.

Forests play an important role in the carbon cycle and contain a substantial proportion of terrestrial biodiversity. Climate change and land use, however, are altering biodiversity and carbon cycling. Rising temperatures, for example, increase decomposition and thus carbon fluxes, while the opposite is expected from loss of decomposer biodiversity as land-use intensity increases. The EU-funded BIOCOMP project will study exactly how climate change and land use interactively shape decomposer communities, decomposition rates and carbon fluxes from wood decomposition. BIOCOMP will quantify changes in decomposer biodiversity and decomposition rates by conducting experiments in the field and in walk-in climate chambers.

A deeper understanding of the interactions between soils and plants, especially at the root zone, where they take up water and nutrients may support sustainable intensification of agricultural production. Research is indicating that a greater understanding of roots and soil functions may lead to increases in crop yields, reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from soils, enhanced productivity in grasslands and reductions in fertiliser requirements to land. However, data gaps remain in our understanding of how plant roots interact with their environment from a physiological and phenotypic perspective. Plant Phenotyping has been described as the bottleneck to food security, yet the real bottleneck to plant phenotyping is thought to be image analysis and processing. The challenge of ensuring food security provides the impetus for ROOTED (Root Phenotyping Integrated Educational Doctoral Network). ROOTED will apply deep learning and artificial intelligence to speed up data generation in root phenotyping.