The June edition of the EU Soil Observatory (EUSO) newsletter is now available, providing the latest highlights and insights on soil-related research and policy developments within the European Union.
The second part of the EUSO Stakeholders Forum 2026 will take place on 25th of June (online), and will focus on the role of AI-driven technologies to achieve healthy soils by 2050. The online event will highlight the possible role AI tools can play in soil health assessments and in extrapolating soil health data in time and space. Presentations will focus on AI-driven decision support systems to support sustainable soil management, methods for AI ready data and digital twins.Link to agenda
The EUSO and EEA are organising webinars dedicated to the scientific knowledge for setting non-binding sustainable target values (STVs) and Operational Trigger values (OTVs) of the Soil Monitoring Law. The webinar on 23 June will be dedicated to Water retention/infiltration & compaction, and the webinar on 1 July to salinisation, acidification and nutrients.
Policy Brief: Unlocking the carbon farming potential via a new generation of Monitoring, Reporting, Verification (MRV) systems
The Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) regulation (EU-2024/3012) aims to develop a voluntary carbon (C) market for the EU, generating a new ‘green business model’. ‘Carbon farming activities’, such as improved soil management, afforestation, and peatlands restoration have the potential to store additional Carbon in biogenic pools (or reduce their emissions) in the order of hundreds Mt per year. In the EU, the biomass and soil pools contain a considerable amount of organic Carbon but changes are difficult to be detected. The credibility and deployment of a voluntary Carbon market is linked to the level of accuracy of reported Carbon changes, which is directly correlated with the costs. A new generation of MRV systems would allow lowering the certification costs and create, at the same time, high quality carbon removal credits.
Archaea are key soil microbes involved in carbon and nitrogen cycles, especially nitrification and methanogenesis, yet their role relative to other microbes and their response to land‑use change remain unclear. Using a continent‑wide collection of 885 European soils from the LUCAS 2018 survey, we applied archaea‑specific metabarcoding primers and shotgun metagenomics to characterise archaeal community structure and function across different land‑use types. Metagenomic analysis shows that intensifying land use raises the relative abundance of archaea, whereas bacterial and eukaryotic proportions stay constant. The 16S archaeal sequences are available in the NCBI SRA under BioProject PRJNA111819
Relaunch of the EUSO data collection on erosion plot data (EU_ERPlot initiative)
Our data compilation and harmonisation is progressing, however, our analysis indicates that a significant portion of data is still out there. As a result, we will re-open the call for contributions in order to target data generated over the past 10 years.EU_ERPlot is a collaborative European network bringing together researchers to build an open-access database of soil erosion measurements at plot scale. Led by the EU Soil Observatory, this voluntary, unfunded initiative aims to bring together datasets from across Europe to improve our understanding of soil erosion under diverse environmental, land use, and climate conditions. All significant contributors will be acknowledged and invited as co-authors in the first EU_ERPlot data publication.
Copper and zinc thresholds in EU topsoils: Insights from LUCAS and literature datasets
Global hotspots of particulate organic carbon losses under climate change
A pan-European spatial inventory of agricultural land degradation
Events
Mission Soil Investment Forum 2026
The European Commission is launching the first Mission Soil Investment Forum, an annual conference focused on business models, finance, and investment for soil health. The forum will bring together policymakers, investors, businesses, researchers, financial institutions, philanthropies, and practitioners to strengthen soil-health investment conditions in Europe.
The second part of the EUSO Stakeholders Forum 2026 will take place on 25th of June (online), and will focus on the role of AI-driven technologies to achieve healthy soils by 2050. The online event will highlight the possible role AI tools can play in soil health assessments and in extrapolating soil health data in time and space. Presentations will focus on AI-driven decision support systems to support sustainable soil management, methods for AI ready data and digital twins.
