Objective
The strategic goal of EcoFINDERS is to provide the EC with tools to design and implement soil strategies aimed at ensuring sustainable use of soils, including: i) Characterisation of European soil biodiversity; ii) Determination of relations between soil biodiversity, soil functions and ecosystem services; iii) Design of policy-relevant and cost-effective indicators for monitoring soil biodiversity. The project will: i) Develop and standardise tools and procedures to measure microbial and faunal diversity; ii) Describe the diversity of soil organisms (microbes and fauna), iii) Decipher the interactions among soil organisms and with plants through foodwebs and iv) Determine the role played by soil organisms in soils ecosystem services (nutrient cycling, carbon storage, water retention, soil structure regulation, resistance to pests and diseases, and regulation of above-ground diversity); iii) Establish cost-effective bioindicators for measuring sustainability of the microbial and faunal diversity and their associated functions (using a combination of metrics and meta-analysis); iv) Evaluate the economic value of ecosystem services, the added value of these bioindicators; v) Develop and implement effective communication strategies to engage the European public around issues associated with the sustainability of soil biodiversity. The overall concept of the project is to develop and integrate the following activities: i) Decipher the links between soil biodiversity, activities, functioning and ecosystem services; ii) Combine three types of approach: observation, experimentation, and computation; iii) Assess the impact of environmental conditions; iv) Integrate information on microbes, fauna and plant communities and analyse how these compartments interact. The general hypotheses are: changes in soil biodiversity indicate the direction and rate of changes in soil functions and associated ecosystem services; application of cost-effective bioindicators brings an economic added value to sustainable soil management.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Programme(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-ENV-2010
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Funding Scheme
CP-IP - Large-scale integrating projectCoordinator
75007 Paris
France
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Participants (27)
SN2 1EU SWINDON WILTSHIRE
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8000 Aarhus C
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65439 Florsheim
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50931 Koln
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75013 PARIS
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1049 Bruxelles / Brussel
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22100 Lund
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1011 JV AMSTERDAM
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3721 MA Bilthoven
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750 07 Uppsala
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R93 Carlow
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9901-862 Horta
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10124 Torino
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4 Dublin
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AB24 3FX Aberdeen
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Participation ended
CB2 1TN Cambridge
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Participation ended
LA1 4YW Lancaster
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6708 PB Wageningen
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6708 PB Wageningen
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Participation ended
811 05 Bratislava
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100193 BEIJING
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1000 Ljubljana
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07100 Sassari
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48940 Leioa
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EH9 3JG Edinburgh
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960 01 Zvolen
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M13 9PL Manchester
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