EU Horizon Research Project: Soil Health Benchmarks

Background

Harmonised monitoring of European soils is an essential, but enormously complex task. It requires coherent yet context-specific monitoring on multiple scales for multiple land uses across all EU member states. Furthermore, different users at different scales (EU policymakers, value-chain businesses, land managers) will want to monitor soil health for different purposes.

The current soil health monitoring systems are, in many cases, apply a traditional minimum soil dataset approach focused on key agronomic soil chemical indicators, pollutants, pH, soil organic carbon (SOC), with a few easy to measure but not very informative soil biological and physical measurements. Furthermore, the monitoring systems are disjointed between users, and the application of indicators is often based on local logistical issues rather than the pertinence of the indicator to the objective of monitoring. Thus far there has been little cohesion across monitoring systems in terms of how indicators are selected and laboratory methods or sampling designs are applied. This has resulted in a lack of interoperability, leading to disjointed advice/regulations on the assessment of soil health and calls for an urgent intervention with the establishment of a framework for measuring soil health that is transparent, harmonised, cost-effective and widely adopted.

To address these challenges, BENCHMARKS proposes co-development within 24 European Living Labs of a multi-scale and multi-user focused monitoring framework that is transparent, harmonised and cost-effective. Underpinned by the best scientific knowledge and technologies this framework provides a clear soil health index for benchmarking, using indicators that are pertinent to the objective of assessment, applicable to the land use and logistically feasible.

Objectives

In line with this and the topic description of the call, BENCHMARKS has set the following specific objectives:

1) Co-develop a coherent Integrated Soil Health Monitoring Framework with stakeholders from 24 Living Labs across Europe, to deliver harmonised and cost-effective indicator- and proxy measurements for the assessment of soil health, in which the link between indicators, soil functions and ecosystem services is clearly demonstrated.

2) Test and validate the SH&F mission indicators as well as the alternative/additional indicators proposed by BENCHMARKS for the different land uses (agriculture, forestry and urban) and for the different scales (local, landscape, region, Europe), and establish context specific thresholds for these indicators.

3) Develop a European broad sampling framework, methodology and protocols, which can serve to support relevant EU policy (and global initiatives including; LULUCF), regulation and monitoring needs. In co-ordination with the JRC the monitoring framework will be integrated within the future LUCAS campaigns, starting with the 2025-2026 campaign, and inform and contribute to the Soil Health law.

4) Support the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and EU Soil Observatory in development of a Soil Health Dashboard.

5) Use the EU open science principals to ensure that project data and protocols are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) and available via the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), that publications are open source and that (intermediary) results of the project are actively made available to the large variety of stakeholders in the project, from EU policymakers, through value-chain businesses for the underpinning of incentivisation schemes, to land-managers and citizens.

6) Focus on co-development, communication, dissemination and exploitation activities from start to finalisation of the project, to ensure that the outputs of the project are relevant, understandable and applicable for the various stakeholders they are designed for. To ensure impact of the outcomes beyond the life of the project, BENCHMARKS will develop an exploitation plan with public and private partners to ensure a much-desired long-term impact for the project.

Consortium

For this ambitious and urgent programme, BENCHMARKS brings together a strong pan-European consortium that builds upon excellent scientific advances in the field of soil health and functions in recent years, connecting coordinators of on-going or recently finished European Commission funded projects such as the EJP Soil (EJP Soil, 2022), Holisoils (Holisoils, 2022), LANDSUPPORT (LANDSUPPORT, 2022), Landmark (Landmark, 2022), iSQAPER (iSQAPER, 2022), Soils4Africa (Soils4Africa, 2022) and MICS (MICS, 2019). The BENCHMARKS consortium are also active members of European policy initiatives such as the Soil Mission Board (Alfred Grand), EUSO data and monitoring working groups (INRAE, WEnR, WU), the European Soil Partnership.