SOB4ES

To ensure all EU soils are healthy by 2050, it is of utmost importance to integrate soil biodiversity (SOB) into land management. However, SOB gets less attention in large monitoring efforts than higher plants and vertebrates. As a result, its contribution to ecosystem services (ES) is undervalued, unquantified, and is not incorporated into EU policies. By creating a comprehensive evaluation framework and determining the cost-effectiveness of SOB indicators in different ecosystems, SOB4ES aims to improve current evaluations of ecosystem condition and to increase the uptake of practical applications to enhance SOB and its contribution to ES. Above all, SOB4ES trans-disciplinary perspective will allow for inclusion of social, economic and political factors to transform soils into healthy systems.

The aim of the EU Soil Strategy is that by 2050 all soils in the EU are healthy. However, cost-effective indicators for soil biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services are missing, and so are cost-effective measures for restoring soil health. SOB4ES will contribute to the Mission A Soil Deal for Europe by: (1) elucidating soil biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and services for major land uses and land use intensity changes; (2) testing cost-effectiveness of existing indicators for soil biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and services; and, (3) evaluating how policy incentives may enhance protection, sustainable management and restoration of soil systems and soil health. By focusing on nine major pedoclimatic (soil type-climate) regions and land uses, including soils from urban, agriculture, forest, (semi)-natural, wetlands, drylands, industrial and mining environments, SOB4ES will cover most relevant EU climate-soil type-land use conditions. SOB4ES will further develop the mapping and assessment of ecosystem conditions (MAES) approach. For agricultural land uses, envisaged sustainable agricultural practices will be compared with conventional high input-output practices. 

Ultimately, SOB4Es will deliver well-validated and applicable indicators for soil biodiversity and ecosystem services for policy evaluation to be used in EU-wide soil health monitoring from the field to the landscape level. SOB4ES will also analyse how networks of soil biodiversity relate to aboveground biodiversity and ecosystem services by advanced artificial intelligence-based machine learning approaches, and scale monitoring up to being applied by remote sensing. Finally, SOB4ES will support a more effective adoption of indicators by large-scale European surveys, such as LUCAS and SoilBON and contribute to the development of the EUSO dashboard and national soil monitoring programmes.