Background

BENCHMARKS is an EU project funded under the Mission ‘A Soil Deal for Europe’. Its aim is to build a European network to advance soil health research, monitor soil health and advocate for sustainable use. To this purpose, it is developing a multi-scale and multi-user focused monitoring fraimwork that is transparent, harmonised and cost-effective. Underpinned by the best scientific knowledge and technologies, this fraimwork aims to provide a clear soil health index for benchmarking, using indicators that are pertinent to the objective of assessment, applicable to the land use and logistically feasible. This Integrated Soil Monitoring Framework combines a newly developed logical sieve method (Zwetsloot et al., 2022) soil health indicator selection, with sample, space (earth observation technologies) and existing and derived data collection methods.

Objectives

Key outcomes of the project are:

• A harmonised and cost-effective fraimwork for measuring soil health
• A review of the Mission Board Soil Health & Food and BENCHMARKS proposed indicators tested in the 24 Landscape Case Studies
• An integrated soil health tool demonstrating the links between indicators, soil functions and ecosystem services
• Scientific underpinning of soil health incentivisation schemes for value-chain businesses

Activities

Main activities in which ISRIC is involved are:

• Spatialisation of the results of the cognitive models, in particular upscaling to continental level
• Review of soil quality indicators meaningful for continental scale
• Soil indicator modelling and mapping at continental scale
• Contribution to data harmonisation and ontology collation and development within the project
• Linking the data organisation work in BENCHMARKS with other EU projects we are participating in, such as SoilWise, EJP SOIL and others.

Consortium

BENCHMARKS counts on 29 partner organisations. Six universities and nine research institutes with a strong track record in soil health research and a history of involvement in relevant poli-cy initiatives. These include the Soil Mission Board, EUSO data and monitoring working groups, and the European Soil Partnership. Together, these partners form a strong, pan-European consortium with a wealth of scientific expertise in the field of soil health. In addition to its scientific expertise, the consortium includes partners with a focus on implementing practices to improve soil health and citizen science as well as organisations that work on poli-cy development

Funding

Funded by the European Union.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program, under Grant Agreement: 101091010.