Building the mission's knowledge repository and advancing the European Soil Observatory

In addition to supporting the roll-out of the Mission ‘A Soil Deal for Europe’ and the development of the European Soil Observatory (EUSO), project outcomes will support the implementation of the European Digital Strategy and the European Strategy for Data and act as a digital enabler for the European Green Deal.

Project results should contribute to all of the following outcomes:

• Enhanced capacities for mission implementation and use of mission results through efficient knowledge management.
• Enhanced access to soil relevant knowledge and data including the outcomes from R&I activities for a wide range of stakeholders.
• Land managers and other actors are able to take more informed soil management decisions and have improved access to knowledge on soils, drivers of soil health and land degradation as well as solutions to improve the status of soils.
• The EU Soil Observatory (EUSO) is populated with comprehensive, interoperable datasets and information on soil health.
• Increased potential for new business opportunities from products, technologies and services derived from improved access to valuable soil datasets and from their reuse.

Data and knowledge on soils are widely distributed and generally not sufficiently structured, which hampers their discovery and usability. A particular difficulty is the integration of outputs and results from research projects that would support a holistic understanding of soil health challenges and potential solutions or allow for the re-use of available knowledge and data for various purposes (e.g. follow-up research, practical applications).

To address this bottleneck, proposals should:

• Develop a strategy, standardised methods and recommendations for the collection, processing, visualisation and exploitation of soil data and knowledge resulting in particular from R&I projects. Data and information gathered should take into account representation from all types of soils, geographic regions and land uses in Europe. Attention should be given to issues of compatibility and interoperability with relevant existing databases and knowledge repositories (e.g. including data from long-term experiments, modelling and monitoring) as well as with services from digital infrastructures, platforms and services.
• Develop and test a prototype for a long-term knowledge and data repository, taking due account of the requirements emerging from the evolvement of the EUSO. The repository developed under the project should be open-access, user-friendly and allow to integrate knowledge from research projects and harmonised scientific data from different sources and technologies including in-situ and remote measurements (e.g. from earth observation). The repository is expected to become later part of the EUSO.
• Explore and take advantage of the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to process and use information and data while enhancing their FAIRness (findability, accessibility, interoperability and re-usability) and turning them into relevant, open and accessible knowledge to support potential users.
• Provide examples for practice-oriented “user cases” to show how potential users (e.g. researchers, land managers, businesses or public authorities, decision-makers) can capitalise on and re-use existing information and data from the knowledge repository.

Activities should be implemented in close cooperation with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the EUSO, also in view of ensuring the longevity, sustainability and interoperability of data, knowledge and services. The proposals shall include dedicated tasks and allocate appropriate resources for this coordination.

Proposals should take due account of on-going developments with regard to knowledge, information and data management in areas relevant to the Soil Deal mission. This includes EU R&I Horizon Europe tools for data collection and storage, Open Science and FAIR principles, IPR and data ownership issues as well as the INSPIRE GEO portal and the EU Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative and its data lake concept. To this end, proposals should set out a clear plan on how to collaborate with other relevant projects and initiatives.

In this topic, the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.

Activities are expected to achieve TRL 5-7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

Digital Agenda
Social Innovation