Pillar 1 focused on the local scale and the development of the Soil Navigator decision support system (DSS) for assessing and improving the supply of several soil functions simultaneously (www.soilnavigator.eu). Soil Navigator has been developed to support farmers and advisors in sustainable management of their land and soil in the long term by i) assessing the initial supply of the five main soil functions based on data entered by the user, ii) providing a number of management recommendations to improve specific soil functions based on the demand and importance entered by the user and iii) evaluating the resulting supply of soil functions based on user preferences for the suggested management recommendations.
The multi-disciplinary team assessed the needs of farmers/advisors for the DSS and incorporated this with scientific knowledge and available data to provide a reliable and user-friendly DSS. The Soil navigator is freely available online in different languages, together with 5 soil functions papers and a DSS dedicated paper, a teaser, an info graphic and video tutorials in different languages.
Pillar 2 developed and tested a monitoring schema to evaluate the supply of soil functions across the climatic regions of Europe. The Pillar 2 team evaluated existing soil monitoring systems across Europe and Member States, considering both the indicators applied and the sampling schema designs. LANDMARK assessed the LUCAS-Soil survey (implemented by the Joint Research Council) which was a pan-European monitoring system, which was started in 2009, with a focus on soil chemical properties, but had since been sampled again in 2015 and 2018 with additional biological and physical properties included for some sites. LANDMARK Pillar 2 worked with the Joint Research Council (JRC) to further optimise the LUCAS-Soil survey to facilitate the monitoring of soil functions rather than soil properties per se.
To define the appropriate set of attributes (indicators) required for the calculation of soil functions, measurements required to compute the five soil functions were defined. These measurements were further assessed in a pan-European sampling campaign to ensure feasibility of data collection (Task 5.4). The test sampling schema included 94 sites across 5 climatic zones (Alpine S., Atlantic, Continental, Mediterranean N., and Pannonia) the sites were split by land-cover (use) into arable – (cereal rotation sites) and grassland (>5 years under grass) sites. Sites were sampled by two teams from 13th April 2018 to 13th June 2018, covering 12 European countries. A management survey was conducted with all farmers. A database containing the soil, environmental and management attributes for the 94 sites was developed and this was used to calculate the capacity of the five soil functions for each site. The data from the sites, the functional capacity and the management recommendations were then communicated back to the 94 site owners through the local contact teams in LANDMARK.
Pillar 3 focused on delivering a set of 11 policy options addressing EU-perspectives on agricultural land management and how they affect the supply of, and demand for, soil functions.
For each soil function, the key governance challenges, together with the main market and policy drivers have been outlined, leading to the development of unique, spatially explicit indicators. A paper on Demands on land: Mapping competing societal expectations for the functionality of agricultural soils in Europe has been published. Deliverable 4.2 aimed to quantify the potential supply of soil functions at EU level through the integration of the outputs of biogeochemical processes based models with Bayesian Belief Networks. Supply maps were produced for all five soil functions in agricultural mineral soils. Due to issues with data suitability and availability only the carbon sequestration and nutrient cycling functions could be evaluated for organic soils.
Different spatial scenarios were used to evaluate synergies and trade-offs between the different soil functions. The outcome of the work described above has been used to develop a set of policy options (presented as Deliverable D5.3) reflecting feedback from the Stakeholder Workshops carried out by WP1 at the onset of the project.
