Soil health is essential for sustainable agriculture, climate action, and environmental resilience. Yet recent assessments estimate that 60–70% of soils in Europe are currently unhealthy, threatening the foundations of ecosystems and food systems. To address this, the European Commission has introduced bold policy frameworks such as the EU Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe” and the Soil Monitoring Law (SML), aiming to significantly improve soil health by 2030. SoilWise was created to support this mission. The project is developing the SoilWise Repository (SWR), a long-term, open access, modular infrastructure for soil knowledge and data across Europe. The SWR enables the discovery, connection, and reuse of fragmented resources by making them FAIR—Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The repository is designed for a broad community: farmers, advisors, researchers, businesses, land managers, public authorities, and policy-makers. It offers a scalable platform to access soil datasets, research outputs, monitoring data, and unstructured knowledge in various formats. In doing so, it builds trust, motivation, and capacity to share and reuse soil information across regions and sectors. Built around three development cycles and guided by stakeholder co-creation, the system uses AI and machine learning to enhance discoverability, automate harvesting, and link data across sources—while respecting ownership, access, and privacy. To ensure practical relevance, five user cases help tailor the repository to actual workflows, such as integrating soil indicators, connecting institutional knowledge, supporting public catalogues, informing policy, and enabling new services. Ultimately, SoilWise applies infrastructure thinking—not project thinking—to build a future-proof repository aligned with the European Soil Observatory (EUSO). Designed to endure beyond the project lifecycle, SoilWise aims to become a trusted foundation for collaboration—enabling Europe to act wisely, starting from the ground up.
