EU204484_46 - Towards climate-smart sustainable manage

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.
Quick and simple soil analyses directly in the field through proximal sensing have the potential to substantially gear up the number of samples analysed. To meet the growing demand for fast and cheap analysis of soils ProbeField will focus on visible and near infrared spectroscopy (vis-NIRS) as an alternative tool to expensive and time-consuming conventional methods. The vis-NIRS technique has many advantages required for field analyses of soil properties. There are, however, drawbacks to be overcome. In contrast to lab spectroscopy, variable moisture and structure in the field will hamper reliability of analyses. ProbeField will test and suggest the most optimal physical and mathematical procedures to manage these problems. A wide range of soil properties will be analysed and 3D mapping will be performed to estimate for example carbon stocks. A best practice protocol will be produced. The overall goal of ProbeField is to develop a set of procedures and methodologies presented in a protocol for reliable in field point estimates of fertility related properties in agricultural soils. In addition, the potential of taking data further to two and three-dimensional mapping by aid of co-variates will be illustrated. This approach will include estimations of carbon stocks, which require not only knowledge of organic matter concentrations, but also of in-situ properties like depth of the relevant horizon as well as soil density. ProbeField is fully aligned with the focus of the DATA1 call on “Innovative techniques to monitor SOC stocks and soil degradation/restoration changes in the EU, using spectral systems/NIRS/MIRS, and other proximal sensing tools in the field”.