Context

The goal of this project is to support the EU ‘The Soil Health & Food Mission’ mission towards reaching its mission goals and targets set by the EU Soil Strategy 2030. The objective is to co-design, create, and maintain an open access European-wide digital infrastructure, termed “AI4SoilHealth”. The infrastructure
will be used for assessing, and continuously monitoring, soil health metrics by land use and/or management. We will build AI4SoilHealth in logical steps: (1) Identify robust & realistic Soil Health Proxies that can detect state and change in soil health relative to the desired soil ecosystem functions/services; (2) Test new proxies based on emerging methods such as soil spectroscopy and molecular arrays that show high promise for characterizing both state and change in soil health; (3) Create a digital infrastructure named a “Soil Digital Twin” (representing the physical environment in a big-data digital environment) that can collect and integrate enormous amounts of soil data. Soil health information can then be effectively shared by stakeholders, including policy-makers and soil professionals in an open access environment; mapped & analyzed at scales ranging from single farms to all of Europe. The Soil Digital Twin will be based on the substantial developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods such as machine learning and artificial neural networks. The selected and implemented methods can synthesize and harmonize big data in support of EU monitoring efforts such as LUCAS (Land Use Change Analysis System) and the EU Soil Observatory, while making full use of remote sensing datasets from the Copernicus Programme and fulfilling compliance with the EU AI Act. 

Objectives

The objective of AI4SoilHealth is to co-design, create and maintain an open access European-wide digital infrastructure, compiled using state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods combined with new and deep soil health understanding and measures. The AI-based
data infrastructure functions as a Digital Twin to the real-World biophysical system, forming a Soil Digital Twin. This can be used for assessing and continuously monitoring Soil Health metrics by land use and/or management parcel, supporting the Commission’s objective of transitioning towards healthy soils by 2030. 

Activities

The project is divided into seven (7) work-packages including: (WP2) Policy and stakeholder engagement - networking and synchronising with EU and national programmes, (WP3) Soil health methodology and standards - developing/testing methodology to be used by WPs 4-6, (WP4) Soil health in-situ monitoring tools and data - developing field and laboratory solutions for Observations & Measurements, (WP5) Harmonised EU-wide soil monitoring services - developing the final suite of tools, data and services, (WP6) Multi-actor engagement pilots - organizing field-works and collect users' feedback, (WP7) Soil literacy, capacity building and communication - organizing public campaigns and producing educational materials.

Key deliverables include: 1) Coherent Soil Health Index methodology, 2) Rapid Soil Health Assessment Toolbox, 3) AI4SoilHealth Data Cube for Europe, 4) Soil-Health-Soil-Degradation-Monitor, and 5) AI4SoilHealth API and Mobile phone App. Produced tools will be exposed to target-users (including farmer associations in >10 countries), so their feedback is used to improve design/functionality. Produced high-resolution pan-European datasets will be distributed under an Open Data license, allowing easy access by development communities. AI4SoilHealth will provide an effective Soil Health Index certification system to support landowners and policy makers under the new Green Deal for Europe.