Background and Objective

The overall goal of the EJP SOIL is to build a sustainable European integrated research system on agricultural soils and develop and deploy a reference framework on climate-smart sustainable agricultural soil management. This will create the enabling environment that will maximise the contribution of agricultural soil to key societal challenges such as food and water security, sustainable agricultural production, climate change
adaptation and mitigation; ecosystem services delivery, biodiversity preservation and human health.

Approach

The European Joint Programme SOIL will include joint programming and execution of research and other joint
integrative activities such as education and training (e.g. short-term missions, workshops), knowledge management, access to experimental facilities and databases, including also harmonisation, standardisation of soil data. The Thünen Institute plays the central role for Germany as a member of EJP soil and is working on various sub-projects within EJP SOIL.

Sub-project CarboSeq:

Carbon sequestration in soils is a natural process that must be actively promoted in order to reduce the effects of climate change on soil quality and thus enabling a more climate-friendly and sustainable soil management. To promote this process in a targeted manner, a comprehensive assessment of the additional quantity of organic carbon that can be stored in the soil with the help of agrcultural management options. This information is currently lacking for European soils and therefore the aim of CarboSeq is to estimate a realizable additional carbon storage potential across Europe, taking into account technical and economic restrictions.

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Sub-project MaxRoot-C:

To combat climate change it is indispensable to reduce CO₂ emissions from the agricultural sector and to bind carbon in the soil compensating for those emissions. This requires a transformation towards cropping systems which are equally profitable but sequester more carbon as the current systems. The most viable yet neglected option is through increased and deeper roots of main and cover crops. The project MaxRoot-C will pioneer assessment methods closing the existing knowledge gaps by providing robust data on root C inputs of main crop varieties and different cover crops across Europe, to determine if and how genotype selection is a useful tool to increase long-term soil carbon stocks and quantify the C sequestering potential therein. It will provide policy relevant data contributing to the development of future carbon sequestration methods of agricultural soils by improved variety selection on which to base future common agricultural policy.

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Sub-project SIMPLE:

Agricultural soils provide a wide array of ecosystem services that need to be maintained and enhanced if agriculture is to be made more sustainable and climate-friendly.
Building on carbon sequestration rates provided by the CarboSeq project, we expand the potential for climate-smart soil management through reductions in fertilization rates to decrease N2O emissions and to comply with the Farm to Fork Strategy.
Potential trade-offs on soil carbon storage will be analyzed using a modelling framework that links soil carbon modelling with nitrogen flow and agro-economic modelling.
Our results will identify risks and benefits of reduced fertilization and support the selection of best measures. The modelling framework will serve as a basic structure for scenario modelling in future studies.

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Sub-projectSoilCompaC:

Soil compaction is a major threat to soil productivity and ecological and hydrological soil functioning. Although adverse impacts of compaction on soil properties and functions are relatively well documented, estimates of the extent and severity of compaction in Europe remain elusive, we have limited knowledge on how compaction changes the carbon cycle, and we lack information on compaction risks for different pedo-climatic zones and cropping systems in Europe and how the risks evolve due to climate change. SoilCompaC directly addresses these knowledge gaps. SoilCompaC will quantify interactions between soil compaction and climate, and present information on how to assess, detect, recover and minimize soil compaction, thereby providing a basis for sustainable soil.

We lack detailed information on how climate change will affect i) the impacts of compaction on key soil functions such as productivity, climate regulation and water cycling, and ii) the risk of soil compaction in different regions of Europe. 

The objectives of SoilCompaC:

• Create a standard in terms of data availability and parameters needed for a country or a region to enable mapping of soil compaction extent and severity,
• Analyse the extent and severity of soil compaction using novel data-driven approaches and/or remote sensing for countries or regions meeting the data standard,
• Evaluate how climate change affects the risk of soil compaction for a range of European pedo-climatic zones,
• Quantify impacts of soil compaction on soil carbon stocks in a climate change context, and estimate impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, crop growth and water balance, for a range of European pedo-climatic zones,
• Synthesize quantitative knowledge on mechanical, natural and biological recovery of compacted soils across Europe

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Links and Downloads

www.ejpsoil.eu