SELVANS · Soil condition and capability mapping for sustainable forest management
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2023-05-15 → 2025-05-14
- EU contribution
- €181,153
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Soil condition and capability mapping for sustainable forest management
Soils are essential for facing humanity’s existential challenges of food security, water security, climate change mitigation and adaptation, sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Whilst the increasing demand for food, clean water and energy by society intensify the pressures on soils, the importance of maintaining the soil resources has gained recognition in the last decades. This emphasizes the need to manage soils according to their intrinsic capability and to assess the effects of human activities on soil condition, so that we can ensure the long-term provision of the services they provide. For example, intensive forestry operations in steep soils can increase erosion, loss of soil organic carbon (SOC) and depletion of nutrients, affecting the growth of trees and other ecosystem functions. Thus, it is important to identify thresholds for soil properties that are used as indicators of functions, to warn us of a possible degradation in soil condition. But every soil is different. What we imagine as a healthy soil, or a soil in good condition, may look very different depending on the pedoclimatic context. We need to identify references specific to the soil class, the local climate, landscape and land use history. These references are suitable for local and regional management. Finding these references becomes difficult in places with a long history of intensive soil use. The main goals of SELVANS were to implement a digital soil mapping framework for setting class-specific thresholds and assessing the effects of forest management on soil condition with respect to reference soils. This knowledge will inform sustainable forest management strategies in the Basque Country, maintain soil multifunctionality, counteract the risk of soil degradation, and upscale estimates on soil condition and capability. The second and more conceptual objective was to design a modelling approach for quantifying soil change in the context of long-term intensive soil use, using France as a case study.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The conservation and improvement of forest soil resources is essential for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the EU Green Deal. Policy-makers and land managers need detailed information -quantitative and spatially explicit- on the effects of management strategies on soil condition and capability for supplying ecosystem services. The rise of digital soil mapping (DSM) and integrative modelling approaches have brought powerful tools for generating data-driven knowledge that can guide the decision-making process. SELVANS will implement an innovative DSM framework for assessing the effects of contemporary forest management on soil change, expressed as biogeochemical processes and microbial functions. The hypothesis is that the response of indicators of soil condition to management practices will differ by soil class depending on the biophysical environment, inherent soil properties and the legacy of land use history. Furthermore, SELVANS will investigate the links between anthropedogenesis and soil microbial functional diversity, and its effects on carbon and nutrient cycling. Soil classes and the degree of anthropogenic pressures on soil will be generated using data-mining algorithms, environmental covariates, time series of satellite imagery, national forestry inventory data and legacy soil data. Soil condition will be characterized with a comprehensive set of physical, chemical and biological soil properties (e.g., soil organic carbon, nutrients, soil microbial diversity and functioning) originating from completed and ongoing projects evaluating the functioning of forest soils. SELVANS' outputs will identify thresholds for decline in soil condition and risk of soil degradation, with an impact for forest management and conservation of soil resources. Finally, the capability of soils for delivering ecosystem services will be quantified applying the integrative modelling framework ARIES.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101063363
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e50439c132&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e51bf82150&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union