Objective

PREPSOIL facilitates the of Horizon Europe Mission deployment "A Soil Deal for Europe" by promoting sustainable soil management, helping key players to restore degraded soils, increasing soil awareness and soil literacy.

PREPSOIL aims to widen the understanding of Living Labs as a vehicle for engaging stakeholders in soil improvements in different land use types (agriculture, forestry, urban, etc.). The mission pioneers, showcases and accelerates the transition to healthy soils through ambitious actions in 100 living labs and lighthouse farms within territorial settings. The mission pioneers, showcases and accelerates the transition to healthy soils through ambitious actions in 100 living labs and lighthouse farms within territorial settings.

PREPSOIL aims to create understanding of how different approaches to soil monitoring may support the transition to sustainable land use, it engages with soil ambassadors and collects information on soil education by establishing a one-stop-shop for soil literacy, communication and engagement as a state-of-the-art web platform

This is combined with an ambitious transdisciplinary R&I programme, a robust, harmonized soil monitoring framework and increased soil literacy and communication to engage with citizens.

Role of EMMAH in PREPSOIL

EMMAH leads work package 5 dedicated to monitoring frameworks and soil indicators, and, in this work package, Task 5.2 entitled “Technical feasibility in using CLMS satellite-based EO to estimate soil health indicator”.  PREPSOIL is transversal within EMMAH as it gathers a soil science expert (P. Renault, lead, DISCOVE team), and a Remote Sensing Scientist (M. Weiss, CAPTE team), both of them supervising G. Xie as a post-doctoral student.

Beyond this work package, EMMAH participates to other work packages, with a great contribution to work package 6 (Promoting soil education, awareness and engagement of Communities of Practice), and coordinates all INRAE teams involved in this project (UR Info&Sols, UMR ETTIS, DS Agriculture, DESSE, and SDAR Avignon (Communication))

The main objectives of WP5 are to 

• consolidate the Mission’s soil monitoring framework by assessing how to extend current and new results –including from other projects -obtained on agricultural soils to natural, forest, urban and industrial soils;
• assess the possibility of using satellite-based EO at different scales and citizen science to soil observations;
• define training needs on soil health monitoring and indicator use and give first input to capacity building.

Besides, the WP management, EMMAH is in charge of evaluating how Earth Observation can help soil health monitoring by providing a survey of existing EO products and how these products are exploited in different European projects dedicated to Soil Health (interview of scientists, surveys filled by project leaders), and providing an example of how these EO products can be used in practice (soil water erosion)

The figure below show the water erosion map obtained with the RUSTLE model by reproducing the JRC EU Soil Observatory methodology for 2015 (left), and the  water erosion map over the same area using the same equations as the JRC EUSO but by using the finest resolution and accurate EO and ground data  (2018) as possible. The area of interest is the surroundings of Dijon, France (Burgundy region).

Partners

See the full list here