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The main goal of MONALISA is to identify and promote the expansion of innovative and tailored solutions to prevent and reverse land degradation and desertification (LDD) while showcasing their socio-economic and environmental effectiveness. MONALISA will put in place a transdisciplinary approach to integrate scientific and local knowledge, emerging from newly and established social learning spaces with multi-sector stakeholders and multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary researchers. Work will be carried out in six Mediterranean case studies (CS), encompassing different levels of aridity across five countries (European: Italy, Spain and Greece; and non-European: Tunisia and Palestine). 

In a world grappling with complex global challenges such as population growth, climate change, and environmental degradation, ensuring security, sustainability, and food safety is paramount. Agricultural practices and food production processes are integral to public health, economic stability, and societal well-being. However, conventional approaches have often operated in isolation, limiting our understanding and hindering scalability. The WHEATWATCHER initiative seeks to break these barriers by uniting soil health monitoring, plant health assessment, and food traceability through a cutting-edge digital soil monitoring system. This system assesses soil nutrition, chemical, and biological factors impacting wheat grains from field growth to flour production, spanning multiple European regions. 

PHISHES aims to bridge the missing link between data on soil health and actions for the safeguard of soils. This missing link entails predictive capability in terms of the consequences of actions on the provision of soil functions and associated ecosystem services, taking into account soil use, soil contamination and various drivers such as climate change. Hence the primary scientific question addressed in PHISHES is: “How do soil use and soil contamination influence soil functions and associated ecosystem services, in the presence of major drivers such as climate change, and how can we predict the impacts of mitigation and adaptation measures?”. While most research teams address this question in a qualitative / semi-quantitative fashion, using, e.g. multicriteria analysis and indicators of soil health, the ambition of PHISHES is to provide quantitative predictive capability via a PHISHES Digital Platform. 

Life on Earth thrives on the foundation of healthy soils, including topsoil and subsoil. While extensive research has focused on the topsoil layer, the subsoils remain largely unexplored. By bringing together key experts and practitioners, DeepHorizon aims to unlock knowledge of the subsoil in critical zone in order to deploy ecosystemic solutions to improve subsoil functions for soil health. DeepHorizon goal is to develop tools that will enable practitioners, land managers and policy makers to access subsoil properties, subsoil functions, soil health indicators and financial decision support tools to promote sustainable subsoil management. 

Above all other considerations, creating a sustainable food system necessitates the restoration of primary production to the 'guardians' of the land, namely the proprietors of small and medium-sized farms and agricultural structures situated in rural areas. The EU-funded GUARDIANS project is designed to bolster agroecological farming models using economical and people-centred digital solutions. These solutions will undergo testing on 22 small and medium-sized farms encompassing diverse production types across six pilot initiatives led by farming cooperatives in four countries. The objective is to assist owners of such farms in bridging the technological divide that separates them from larger farms. This objective is pursued through a co-creative approach that involves farmers, agricultural stakeholders, scientists, technicians, and SMEs.