project - Research and innovation

Transforming Unsustainable management of soils in key agricultural systems in EU and China. Developing an integrated platform of alternatives to reserve soil degradation
TUdi Transforming Unsustainable management of soils in key agricultural systems in EU and China Developing an integrated platform of alternatives to reserve soil degradation

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Kontext

Some of the most challening development goals of the UN for 2030 (UN, 2015) rely on healthy and productive agricultural ecosystems. About two billion people and 1.9 billion hectares of land are affected by land degradation globally (Nasser et al., 2018), with an estimated cost to the global economy between $18-20 trillion USD annually (UNCCD, 2019). The European Commission estimates that current management practices result in approximately 60-70% of EU soils being unhealthy, with a further uncertain percentage of unhealthy soils due to poorly quantified pollution issues (Panagos et al., 2019). TUdi Project proposes a way to more rapidly improve soil health, allowing end-users to define needs and what they can be able to implement and put forward the best sciene and companies to deliver it in a short time through co creation of solutions with a large number of stakeholders with direct impact on a very large number of farms and other agents of change for soils. These solutions are born from capitalizing on long-term success stories, focus research on providing a comprehensive interpretation and exploitation of results. In addition, the TUdi project has a comprehensive and pragmatic approach, integrating cutting edge science, dynamic SMEs and committed stakeholders who are highly interconnected national and internationally.

Objectives

To develop strategies to restore, or improve, soil health and balanced fertilization in agricultural areas in cooperation with farmers. This will include the development of a suite of decission support tools to identify and reverse soil degradation processes and implement adequate fertilization valid across agricultural areas of Europe and China.

Objectives

Desarrollar estrategias para restaurar o mejorar la salud del suelo y la fertilización equilibrada en zonas agrícolas en cooperación con los agricultores. Esto incluirá el desarrollo de un conjunto de herramientas de apoyo a la toma de decisiones para identificar y revertir los procesos de degradación del suelo e implementar una fertilización adecuada aplicable en zonas agrícolas de Europa y China.

Activities

Engage and cooperate with multiple stakeholders to identify and understand ther needs and also possibilities to cope with soil degradation and the oppotunities to implement them. Develop a set of farm planning tolls to facilitate implementation of fertilization and strategies for soil degradation control and soil restoration at farm scale. Provide different types of stakeholders with a deep understanding of these soil restoring startegies at farm scale on soil quality, nutrient balance, profitability and yield of the farm. Scaling up adoption of sustainable use of soils in a large number of multiple farms.

Activities

See description of project activities in English

Additional comments

The main potential barriers/obstacles to achieving project objectives include: 1- Final users lack interest in the developed solutions. To avoid this, the TUdi project is built around identifying end-user needs for specific applications, with the community of stakeholders embedded in WP5 defining these needs from its inception, the first month of the project. 2- Obsolescence, and irrelevance, of developed solutions. To prevent this, the TUdi consortium TUdi includes leading SMEs in both fields, enabling rapid implementation during the initial phase of the project with state of the art technologies, which will be upgraded during the life time of the project. 3- Lack of investment capacity for farmers and other end users to implement proposed technical solutions at farm scale. This risk is minimized through a multi-actor approach in which stakeholders define the feasibility of the solutions to be explored and tested in the project. Cost-Benefit-Analysis of each solution within the project for different farm types can make significant contributions towards generating information that supports policy makers for addressing this in Europe, China and New Zealand. 4- Limited involvement of public administration at local, national and regional levels. To minimize this risk, TUdi already has engaged relevant policy actors since the project definition and included them in the stakeholders network. In addition, it will proactively get involved with additional local, regional, national and EU public bodies during the project life for dissemination and communication.

Additional information

TUdi is a four-year project built around a multi-actor cooperative platform for integrating the best available research and technical knowledge into transformational farming practices in three major cropping systems across EU and China. This concept has the potential to be adopted by other stakeholders in future scaling up of the project’s results.

TUdi has two core elements: On the one hand, a network of cooperator actors, with a total of forty-two NGOs, associations, companies or government agencies with access to a large number of farmers, embedded with national partners to become active members in all project activities, acting as multipliers of TUdi activities and results. On the other hand, a network of sixty-six long-term experiments and monitored farms on cereal-based rotations, tree crops and grasslands, the three cropping systems to be covered in TUdi. This will allow us to exploit baseline data, in different farming types, on soil quality, fertilization, water balance, farm productivity and management and barriers to adoption within Europe, China and New Zealand, our New Zealand partners (with their own funding) will bring experience of restoring degraded grasslands and managing cropping practices in an industry operating outside of subsidies. These experiments will also act as strategic dissemination points and beacons for communication activities.

Project details
Main funding source
Horizon 2020 (EU Research and Innovation Programme)
Horizon Project Type
Multi-actor project
Project acronym
TUdi
Ort
Main geographical location
Córdoba

EUR 5,906,545

Total budget

Total contributions including EU funding.

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4 Practice Abstracts

SEST will enable farmers to apply a set of digital tools to improve the technical efficiency of their farms by applying various DSTs, developed by the TUdi project, in several directions for instance, analyze costs and benefits in different dimensions, evaluate the effectiveness of implementing soil restoration strategies, and also apply economic methods and mechanisms to improve soil quality. In addition, SEST will allow policy makers to make decisions based on information related to the implementation of policies at regional and national level. The SEST combines basic economic calculations with additional information on the specific risks and linkages of other DSTs for soil restoration strategies. This tool allows stakeholders to shape the economic performance of their farm through a wide range of tools. The SEST platform enables the processing of user-specific data using other DST embedded within TUdi and provides the results in a comprehensible and accessible way. Moreover, One of the modules that make up this tool is focused on analyzing the data, the results and the available alternative strategies for soil restoration, and subsequently, defines the final decision on what should be chosen and can conduct to improve results in terms of achieving better soil quality.

SEST permitirá a los agricultores aplicar un conjunto de herramientas digitales para mejorar la eficiencia técnica de sus explotaciones mediante la aplicación de diversos DST ( decison support tool, herramienta para el apoyo en la toma de decisiones) desarrollados por el proyecto TUdi, en varias direcciones. Por ejemplo, analizar costes y beneficios en diferentes dimensiones, evaluar la eficacia de la aplicación de estrategias de restauración del suelo, y también aplicar métodos y mecanismos económicos para mejorar la calidad del suelo. Además, SEST permitirá a los responsables políticos tomar decisiones basadas en información relacionada con la aplicación de políticas a nivel regional y nacional. La SEST combina cálculos económicos básicos con información adicional sobre los riesgos y vínculos específicos de otras DST para las estrategias de restauración del suelo. Esta herramienta permite a los interesados configurar el rendimiento económico de su explotación mediante una amplia gama de instrumentos. La plataforma SEST permite procesar datos específicos del usuario utilizando otras DST integradas en TUdi y proporciona los resultados de forma comprensible y accesible. Además, uno de los módulos que componen esta herramienta se centra en el análisis de los datos, los resultados y las estrategias alternativas disponibles para la restauración del suelo, y posteriormente, define la decisión final sobre lo que se debería elegir y se pueda llevar a cabo, atendiendo a la sostenibilidad y viabilidad de la ejecución y posterior mantenimiento, para mejorar los resultados en términos de conseguir una mejor calidad del suelo.

The development of a guide for erosion control in tree crops is one of the expected short-term results of the TUdi project, focusing on Andalusia, which will be initiated on a regional scale to be wide during the lifetime of the project. The main expected results are based on the compilation of data from long-term experiments and the application of predictive models such as ORUSCAL. This will provide farmers and end users contrasted information, taking into account multiple criteria, to support and improve their decision-making.

El desarrollo de una guía para el control de la erosión en cultivos arbóreos es uno de los resultados esperados a corto plazo del proyecto TUdi, centrado en Andalucía, que se iniciará a escala regional para posteriormente ser ampliado durante la vida del proyecto. Los principales resultados esperados se basan en la recopilación de datos de experimentos a largo plazo y la aplicación de modelos predictivos como ORUSCAL. Esto proporcionará a los agricultores y usuarios finales información contrastada, teniendo en cuenta múltiples criterios, para apoyar y mejorar su toma de decisiones.

The main objective of this practice is to develop a meta-database of farms and long-term experiments, acting as a repository, which takes into account the data available at the partners and allows queries to be performed on the data. In particular for the various experiments, especially those related to soil degradation processes. This can be used to associate experimental sites where the necessary data are available to investigate a certain degradation problem or to extend the scope of the degradation problem investigation or to widen the range of monitoring data in the desired direction through collaboration with other databases from operational groups or projects embedded within Horizon 2020. The stored information can be used, in particular by offering the possibility to be consulted by project partners and consultants and also by the end users, for the latter will need help from project partners or are within operational groups where they will have such support. The main result is that TUdi partners and allowed users can query the data and metadata of farms and experiments according to their purposes. Users can contact the data host assigned by the partner responsible for the experiments to the source data of the farms and experiments selected as a result of the queries, to request the appropriate data content for the Decision Support Tools to be developed in the TUdi project.

El principal objetivo de esta práctica es desarrollar una metabase de datos de explotaciones y experimentos a largo plazo, que actúe como repositorio, que tenga en cuenta los datos disponibles en los socios y permita realizar consultas sobre los datos. En particular, para los distintos experimentos, especialmente los relacionados con los procesos de degradación del suelo. Esto puede utilizarse para asociar sitios experimentales en los que se disponga de los datos necesarios para investigar un determinado problema de degradación o para ampliar el alcance de la investigación del problema de degradación o para ampliar la gama de datos de seguimiento en la dirección deseada mediante la colaboración con otras bases de datos de grupos operativos o proyectos integrados en Horizonte 2020. La información almacenada puede ser utilizada, en particular, ofreciendo la posibilidad de ser consultada por los socios y consultores del proyecto y también por los usuarios finales, ya que estos últimos necesitarán ayuda de los socios del proyecto o se encuentran dentro de grupos operativos en los que contarán con dicho apoyo. El resultado principal reside en que los socios de TUdi y los usuarios permitidos pueden consultar los datos y metadatos de las granjas y experimentos según sus propósitos. Los usuarios pueden contactar con el gestor de datos asignado por el socio responsable de los experimentos a los datos fuente de las granjas y experimentos seleccionados como resultado de las consultas, para solicitar el contenido de datos apropiado para las Herramientas de Ayuda a la Decisión que se desarrollarán en el proyecto TUdi.

An objective of the TUdi project is to propose interventions against detectable soil degradation processes at specific locations that can be used by farmers, through the development of digital support tools . One of the six Decision Support Tools (DST) proposed within TUdi is the soil erosion risk management tool, intended to implement erosion management. Its main objective is to develop a quantitative tool to guide, in a simple and effective way, and without the need for excellent technical knowledge, stakeholders towards the implementation of agricultural management strategies aimed at erosion reduction. The main added value of this tool is its ease of use, eliminating arduous scientific explanations that have no impact and do not create value for end users. Moreover, through the results obtained by the tool, the end user will receive an optimal amount of information with which could make better decisions, and in turn, will be able to interpret the reason for those decisions. Other DSTs will also be carried out in which stakeholders and technicians will be able to tackle agricultural management strategies aimed at restoring or improving soil health with a specific focus on fertilization, biological activity, soil compaction, soil structure, and soil carbon content . All of those DSTs are targeted and designed according to the needs and requirements of the stakeholders, with an emphasis on economic and practical feasibility. 

Un objetivo del proyecto TUdi es proponer intervenciones contra los procesos detectables de degradación del suelo en lugares específicos que puedan ser utilizadas por los agricultores, mediante el desarrollo de las herramientas digitales de apoyo. Una de las seis Herramientas de Apoyo a la Toma de Decisiones, por sus siglas en inglés (DST), propuestas en el marco del proyecto TUdi, es la herramienta de gestión del riesgo de erosión del suelo, destinada al manejo del riesgo de erosión. Su principal objetivo es desarrollar una herramienta cuantitativa para guiar, de forma sencilla y eficaz, y sin necesidad de excelentes conocimientos técnicos, a las partes interesadas hacia la implementación de estrategias de gestión agrícola orientadas a la reducción de la erosión. El principal valor añadido de esta herramienta es su facilidad de uso, eliminando arduas explicaciones científicas que no tienen impacto y no crean valor para los usuarios finales. Además, a través de los resultados obtenidos por la herramienta, el usuario final recibirá una cantidad óptima de información con la que podrá tomar mejores decisiones y, a su vez, podrá interpretar el porqué de dichas decisiones. También se proponen otras cinco herramientas en la que los agentes interesados podrán aplicar estrategias para la mejora de la salud del suelo centradas en la fertilización, en la actividad biológica, en mediciones de la compactación del suelo, en la propia estructura del suelo y en el contenido de carbono en el suelo. Todas esas DSTs están orientadas y diseñadas en función de las necesidades y requisitos de los interesados, haciendo hincapié en la viabilidad económica y práctica. 

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Contacts

Project coordinator

  • CSIC

    Project coordinator

Project partners

  • Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas

    Project partner

  • Agrartudomanyi Kutatokozpont

    Project partner

  • Agrisat Iberia S.L.

    Project partner

  • Beijing Forestry University

    Project partner

  • Beijing Normal University

    Project partner

  • Universitaet fuer Bodenkultur Wien

    Project partner

  • China Agricultural University

    Project partner

  • Czech Technical University in Prague

    Project partner

  • Lincoln University

    Project partner

  • New Bulgarian University

    Project partner

  • Northwest A&F University

    Project partner

  • Northwest University

    Project partner

  • Pensoft Publishers

    Project partner

  • University of Lancaster

    Project partner

  • Università degli Studi di Torino

    Project partner