Sustainable Soil and Subsoil health promotion by implementing agroecological land use and management to enhance ecosystem services delivery for society

According to the EU Soil Strategy, around 60 to 70% of the soils in the European Union are not healthy and suffering from severe degradation processes.

The degradation processes primarily affecting the topsoils are also depleting the subsoil health reducing the ecosystem services delivery. However, subsoil knowledge is scarce in spite of the relevance it has.

SUS-SOIL is a 4-year project adopting multidisciplinary approach that will develop a set of 15 Subsoil-Living Labs (LLs) to inventory, analyse and benchmark different agroecology subsoil management (ASM) and land uses and their impacts on the subsoil spatial variations and dynamics to best combine ASM practices in rural and urban areas within a global regional context.

SUS-SOIL results will be the start point to increase the awareness of land managers and public authorities to understand the subsoil threats and risks, support EU agroecological transformation tackling subsoils and increasing ecosystem services delivery, promote water security and climate change mitigation of rural and urban ecosystems.

The main outcomes include: (1) develop a subsoil/soil monitoring database (S-DB) able to be interoperable with the LUCAS and ESDAC databases, (ii) the analysis long-term ASM land use and management of 3 relevant types of soil per LL and the relationship with rural and urban ecosystem services delivery including modelling, (iii) develop a set of farm idiotypes per LL mixing the ASM best practices as an alternative to conventional systems to enhance the ecosystem services provision at regional level for citizens through (iv) a Subsoil Decision Support Tool (S-DST) considering soil degradation and relevant business models and propose a (v) subsoil policy strategy framework to foster ASM best practices.