EU204484_56 - 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.
Soil fauna and microbial communities drive key ecosystem functions, such as nutrient supply to primary production and SOC accumulation. However, plant diversity shapes soil biota composition and activity via rhizodeposition and N-P uptake, microbial symbioses, and trophic cascades. In EU experimental sites network, the project will study how agroecological intensification of cropping systems (e.g. introduction of plant services) can allow better regulation of degradation/resynthesis of soil organic matter and nutrient cycling by the plant-soil system. Advantages and disadvantages of such agroecological systems will be compared to less conservative ones for plant-soil fauna microbial functional diversity, biomass production, N leaching, soil C-stable pools, GHG emission and C sequestration. AGROECOseqC project goals will be: Quantify the impact of agricultural practices on ecosystem services, including biomass production, SOC storage, greenhouse gas emission and nutrient retention; Analyse the role played by plant diversity and specific traits on soil fauna and microbial community diversity and functioning, as relevant drivers for SOC storage in soil; particular interest will be put on the fungal mycelial network development in soil and its function at increasing soil aggregates stability; Assess the level of synchrony between plant nutrient demand, nutrient supply from soil biota and decomposition/resynthesis of soil organic matter along the gradient of tested agroecological management practices; Identify the most sensitive and robust indicators able to describe the agroecosystem, and how the considered agroecological practice can shape plant community, soil meso- and microfauna, soil microbial community and functioning in favour of C persistence in soil; Integrate microbial functional diversity and rhizosphere plant-soil interactions (soil fauna, rhizosphere priming, plant control of SOM dynamics, symbiotic associations) into a model of ecosystem C and N cycling (SYMPHONY); Contribute to integrate these variables in other models considered by other current EJPSoil projects (SOMMIT, CarboSeq, others), also comparing different models’ performances on the dataset produced by the project.