PREPSOIL

Brief description

The Mission ‘A Soil Deal for Europe’ states that the lack of knowledge and awareness of the importance of long-term soil health for different stakeholders – land managers, industries, consumers and society at large – is a major driver of soil degradation affecting its capacity to provide ecosystem services. In fact, there is the estimation of between 60 and 70% of soils in the European Union are unhealthy. This means that soil awareness and soil literacy is going to be a hot topic in the next decade.

The PREPSOIL (Preparing for the "Soil Deal for Europe" Mission) project facilitates the deployment of "Soil Deal for Europe" mission across European regions, by helping key-players beyond agriculture field in reducing soil degradation, while increasing soil awareness and soil literacy.

Our Role

Trust-IT leads the Work Package on “web portal, online community engagement and training”, including all the related tasks:

• Webportal: development, maintenance, operations and quality assurance of the PREPSOIL web portal;
• Virtual, cross-disciplinary community engagement channels: development of online digital tools to ensure community engagement with the different stakeholders, namely a Living Labs atlas, online forum, gamification activities, amongst others;
• Multilingual Knowledge-Hub: a cross-disciplinary knowledge base for access to “sustainable soils” information, with a self-serve online library of information and data sets.

Trust-IT is also involved in the “Dissemination, exploitation, communication and stakeholder management” Work Package, where it will provide a strong support on all activities.

Impact

PREPSOIL facilitates the deployment of "Soil Deal for Europe" mission across European regions, by helping key-players beyond agriculture field in reducing soil degradation, while increasing soil awareness and soil literacy. PREPSOIL mission on healthy soils is focused in three key impact pathways:

• Improve the knowledge-base and access to critical information for land managers on soil health;
• Establish an overview of soil needs and status regarding monitoring Living Labs and Light Houses;
• Increase soil literacy and awareness to citizens and society at large, through education, dissemination and access to information.

PREPSOIL will increase networking and knowledge exchange between communities across Europe at regional/local level on soil health taking into account various type of land uses and based on the work undertaken in existing and new Living Labs and Light Houses. All research data and PREPSOIL outputs will be available under FAIR principles, maximising their usefulness and allowing the whole research community to benefit from them.

PREPSOIL is going to reach out to a wider audience: from universities to citizen scientists; from school students and teachers to soil monitoring agencies; up to society at large.

Funding

PREPSOIL has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101070045