Soil health monitoring and sensing of nature based solutions

According to estimates, 60-70% of the soils in the EU have lost their ability to provide essential ecosystem services. As part of the Green Deal, the EU has therefore set itself the goal of developing new ways of management to improve soil health. In this Horizon Europe project, new instruments are being developed to accompany the transition towards agro-ecologically oriented management systems. In particular, digital and imaging methods are tested and developped to detect soil health advances in the field. This should enable farmers to make an on-farm assessment of changes and progress from changes in their management systems and thereby also increase the availability of larger-scale monitoring data about the health status of agricultural soils. The project thus aims to support the research integration into practical farming innovation to be established as part of the EU "Mission Soil Health" for innovative lighthouse farms that are to become the drivers of agro-ecological transformation of European agriculture.