SoilWise

More than ever, soil health is an issue, as recent assessments state that 60-70% of European soils can be considered unhealthy. The Soil Deal for Europe aims to have 75% of EU soils healthy or significantly improved by 2030. Reaching such an ambition requires, among others, access to reliable, harmonised existing and new data and knowledge collected at local, national and EU levels to allow informed decision-making at all scales to support the Soil Health Law and the EU Soil Strategy.

SoilWise will provide an integrated and actionable access point to scattered and heterogeneous soil data and knowledge in Europe, making them FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and improve trust, willingness, and ability to share and re-use soil data and knowledge. In three project development cycles, co-creation and co-validation by multi-stakeholder groups are the center of project active specific user needs and aims to work with them to enhance their discoverability, approachability and interconnection. An open, modular, scalable and extensible knowledge and data repository building on existing and new technologies will be provided while respecting data ownership, access policies and privacy. AI- and ML- techniques will be employed to interlink scattered data and knowledge, automatize the processes, infer new knowledge and increase FAIRness. SoilWise applies infrastructure thinking instead of project thinking to design a repository for at least a decade to support EUSO (European Soil Observatory) evolvement accordingly. To do so, 5 cross-scale use cases covering the all 6 SoilWise target groups, comprising national and EU government levels, land managers, research, agri-business and others which include in total ≥ 35 users and data providers from 3 or more countries will be implemented will also implemented. The SoilWise repository and community are designed to be a joint starting point and common ground for countries, the European Commission and other stakeholders to jointly guide soil and related spatial policy and informed decision making towards the 2030 goals of the Green Deal, achieve healthy soils in 2050 and ensure broad uptake and implementation by land managers, policy, research and industry.

Role of GAIA: Consortium partner

Main activities and responsibilities of GAIA EPICHEIREIN

GAIA will be the leader of User Case 5 aiming to define under which conditions farmers, land owners, technology providers and smart farming technology providers can benefit. Furthermore, GAIA’s contribution is on key importance since its shareholder includes more than 151,000 farmers and represents both Greek farmers and advisors at an EU level as it is a member of Copa Cogeca and EUFRAS.

Moreover, as Task 5.4 “Best practices and replication guidelines”, leader will boost replication of best practices derived from Use cases implementation. Also following the analysis of SoilWise repository, will share knowledge lessons learnt and good practices.