Project hub

Societies depend on soil. Fertile and productive soil is the foundation of our existence and the prerequisite for a stable supply of food, fibre, animal feed, timber and other biomasses. Soil sustains biodiversity and contributes to the provision of a wide range of ecosystem services, and as the largest store of carbon on land, it is also in the nexus of global climate challenges. Soil is part of the solution to realising the SDGs. The threat of global warming makes climate-smart sustainable agricultural soil management crucial. The EU-funded EJP SOIL project will create an enabling environment to enhance the contribution of agricultural soils to key societal challenges such as climate change adaptation and mitigation, sustainable agricultural production, ecosystem services provision as well as prevention and restoration of land and soil degradation. The project brings together a group of 26 leading European research institutes and universities in 24 countries. More information is available at www.ejpsoil.org.

Unsustainable management and climate change are increasing land degradation and threatening soil biodiversity. Urgent action is thus required to mainstream sustainable soil management practices. However, major knowledge gaps related to biodiversity and soil-mediated ecosystem services must be addressed. The EU-funded SOILGUARD project will therefore develop a conceptual and analytical framework with the potential to become the global standard for future assessments of soil biodiversity status. All knowledge will be shared through SOILGUARDIANS, a predictive tool based on the links between soil biodiversity, soil multifunctionality and wellbeing to support stakeholders in their transition to sustainable management. SOILGUARD will co-create evidence-based conservation recommendations for policies and frameworks at the EU and international level and support Member States commitments under the Global Soil Partnership.

The EU-funded TUdi project will develop, upscale and disseminate soil restoring strategies in three major agricultural systems (cereal-based rotations, tree crops and grasslands), for different farm typologies and environmental conditions in Europe, China and New Zealand. Researchers in cooperation with end-users and stakeholders will conduct long-term experiments on monitored farms to identify soil degradation situations, proven strategies for restoring soil health and barriers to their adoption at farm level. This bottom-up approach will be used to develop digital tools to predict the impact of these strategies on nutrient and water balance, yield, cost-benefit, and farm operations and guide farmers towards implementing strategies to restore soil health. Solutions will be complemented by raising awareness of the relevance of healthy soils for sustainable development to the general public.

A sustainable, ecological approach in farming is today a solution in front of the growing challenges of climate change, depleted natural resources, shrinking biodiversity and reduced soil quality. Agroecology can address these challenges, reinforcing the resilience of farming systems. Existing instruments offered by open innovation arrangements can serve this goal, particularly living labs (LL) and research infrastructures (RIs). For this reason, the EU-funded ALL-Ready project will develop AgroEcoLLNet, a new framework for the future European network of LLs and RIs. The project will lay the groundwork and prepare the necessary prerequisites and activities. Testing will verify and improve the project’s outcomes, which will be communicated widely in Europe. The implementation plan will be tested and integrated into the validated framework of AgroEcoLLNet.

The climate change manifests in longer periods of drought on one hand and extreme overflow of watercourses on the other hand. This will significantly disrupt the agriculture sector, which strongly relies on certain temperatures and precipitation levels. The farming choices and the climate will determine the water footprint of agriculture: over-exploitation of water resources is a threat to farming and the environment. This is the origin of the LIFE HYDROSTICK project, which aims at making precision farming easy and accessible by means of demonstrating in real scale a new modular, flexible, autonomous, user-friendly (plug&connect) and customisable IoT solution allowing real-time monitoring of soil data (i.e. water content, water potential, temperature, conductivity (quality and type of mineral salts), nutrients (N,P,K), pH), to increase sustainability and productivity in the agro-industry sector.