SHARInG-MeD - Soil Health and Agriculture Resilience through an Integrated Geographical information systems of Mediterranean Drylands

Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) is a crucial indicator of soil fertility and a major greenhouse gases (GHG) sink. It directly sustains agricultural productivity and soil biodiversity, and provides many ecosystems services. SOC contributes to soil resistance to erosion (a major player of soil degradation in drylands), and increase Soil Water Holding Capacity (SWHC), and nutrient availability. Land sequesters one third of anthropogenic C released to the atmosphere, with soil as a major player. In drylands, soil is a reservoir of inorganic carbon (SIC), which can releases GHGs. SOC and SIC depend on both environmental (e.g., pH, mineral contents, moisture, etc.), and management conditions. Bedrock, topography, soil biological community, Land Use and Land Use Change (LULUC), and soil management are important drivers of soil C turnover and interact at various spatio-temporal scales. This implies land and soil managements should be adapted to the environmental and social conditions to maintain ecosystem functions. Thus, policy decision on agriculture requires integrated data on soil, land management and agriculture to improve the food system resilience (e.g., profit and food security) and protect the environment. For this purpose, many data collection campaigns and analytic standards were setup. These, however, hardly provide a concerted information due to a lack of harmonization (that allows to translate data from different methods in a consistent information), and for a lack of spatio-temporal paired observation (i.e., taken in the same site) to efficiently model the most probable past, present and future scenarios. Despite efforts in data harmonization (e.g., Soil Atlas), the available soil datasets often record one or few soil traits with scarce ability to infer on their relationship with soil biotic activities and GHGs emissions. However, these databases don’t provide direct information on the role of LULUC and agricultural management on soil and their economic and environmental impacts. The scarcity of information for the Mediterranean, especially Western Asia and Northern Africa (WANA) limits to infer on the relationship between WANA and European environments, which on the whole represent a transect to study the impact of climate change. In Europe, a wide soil monitoring network (the LUCAS soil module) has been run since 2009 and updated in 2012, 2015, 2018, and 2022. LUCAS sampling density is higher than any other pan-European campaign, but sparse in many areas, including the High Nature Value Farmland. LUCAS presently does not cover WANA, which shows similar limits to the European environments. Various projects are sampling soils in WANA, e.g., H2020 Soils4Africa (GAID 862900), despite covering North Africa with low density, especially Algeria, and through a different collection strategy than LUCAS. Soil properties in cropland are also affected by management, especially soil tillage, that in Mediterranean drylands is however scarcely taken into account in the ongoing H2020 projects (e.g. Soilcare, GAID 677407; KASSA, Contract GOCE-CT-2004-505582) and scientific literature. In drylands, tillage reduction can provide high benefits for soil health, crop yield and farmer profitability increasing SWHC, microbial biomass and N turnover, and reducing fuel use and costs. Despite these benefits, conservation agriculture adoption in drylands is hampered by social issues.

SHARInG-MeD aims to integrate key soil traits complying and partly overlapping with the LUCAS and the Soil4Africa project from a wide sampling in paired land uses and on 3 key soil and crop-improving management strategies: conservation agriculture, the addition of organic materials, inoculation with plant and soil beneficial microbes while considering soil salinity. Pot studies will deepen the role of salinity on plants and soil and N turnover (Italy, Turkey). Potential GHG emission, economic and life cycle assessments (LCA) will be studied. We will build models to deploy the interaction among environmental traits (especially soil), management (including LULUC and tillage), and environmental and economic impacts. SHARInG-MeD partners are already involved in these aspects: conservation agriculture and modelling of soil traits, economic and environmental impacts (UNIPI), digital technologies, soil microbiology and other soil biota, including weeds. The coordinator (UNIPI) is involved in projects on conservation agriculture, nutrient management and beneficial microbes (e.g. PRIMA 2020 ProSmallAgriMed; and H2020 SolACE, GAID 727247), the partners in SOC modelling, DSSs on Land Management, and optimization of agricultural management, and agronomic use of microbial consortia, their functional analyses, and soil metataxonomic studies.

SHARInG-MeD will contribute to short-to-medium-term impacts: EI.1 – Improved monitoring of soil and land degradation in the Mediterranean context through a harmonised set of indicators. The combination of a wealth of information among physical, chemical, biological, agronomic, economic, and other environmental indicators will provide a platform to integrate measurements of these indicators from other studies and infer their overall impact of agriculture on the soil health or degradation process (WP3, WP4, WP5). EI.2 – Mapping of research infrastructures and Living labs as enabling environments for the monitoring and assessment. SHARInG-MeD will provide the chance of agronomic, economic and environmental success of management strategies (land use change and adoption of no tillage) depending on the environmental and economic traits of the areas. Also, research infrastructures and Living labs retrieved, especially in North Africa, will be used for the organization of promotion events of the Horizon Europe Soil Mission (WP6, WP7). EI.3 – Contribution to the JRC’s Soil Atlas of the Mediterranean Region. SHARInG-MeD will provide a chance of harmonising the data from the Soil Atlas with the pan-Med collections of soil traits through a model-to-model comparison that will pivot on the coinciding samples from the Soil Atlas and SHARInG-MeD (WP2, WP3, WP4). SHARInG-MeD will contribute to long-term impacts (EI.4/6; EI.5; and EI.7) EI.4/EI.6 – Assessing/Enabling the assessment of the potential positive effects on the agro-ecosystem water, carbon and nutrients cycle of appropriate soil management practices through a validated and harmonised set of indicators (biological, chemical, physical). SHARInG-MeD will provide a direct evaluation between measured soil properties and environmental impact (by LCA) of agriculture at the field scale and from the cradle to the farm gate. Models of nutrient turnover, measurements of available water and hydrological properties and salts, and LCA indicators will provide information on the role of management practices on land and water protection (WP4, WP5). EI.5 – Enabling Improved predictions for the potential role of Mediterranean soils for soil carbon sequestration and how external disturbances can affect this potential. SHARInG-MeD will strengthen the information on the relationship between 4 key management strategies (land use change, conservation agriculture, addition of organic materials and soil beneficial microbes) on the ability of soil to sequester CO2, (from emission in LCA and incubation experiments). Models of SOC stabilization will provide predictions on the maintenance need of these strategies to support soil and reduce GHG emissions. The economic models will provide information on the cost or benefit of these relative choices (WP4, WP5). EI.7 – Mitigating the advance in desertification through improved soil information systems able to alert on the current risks for soil degradation. The increase in the number of soil samples (especially in Algeria), and of integrated variables compared to the present state of the art, and the released models to choose new sites to samples will provide higher resolution information on the desertification process and, along with LCA results from the field experiments from Turkey, Tunisia, and Italy, will provide a measure of the risk of desertification in terms of direction, intensity and time needed to reach given goals depending on the land and crop management (WP4). Additional impacts covered by SHARInG-MeD are economic, social, environmental and research-related. Environmental impacts: We will provide a direct, and concerted, picture of the actual environmental impact (according to the LCA methodology) of the land use and field crop management in a wide area (Mediterranean drylands) and potential condition (imposing the prospected conditions in the LCA). SHARInG-MeD will also provide insight on the agricultural impact in scarcely sampled WANA areas. Societal impacts: SHARInG-MeD will promote di direct transfer or results to the farmers, the scholars, the policymakers and other stakeholders and, at the one time, promote the application of conservation measures capable of improving yields, profit and SOC accumulation in WANA. Economic impacts: SHARInG-MeD will consist of two different additional lines of positive economic impacts: from the one site, the stimulation of the application of conservation measures will directly impact the rural dryland areas both in the short and the long term. On the other side, the setup of a concerted model of estimation of environmental, social, agricultural and soil traits will provide a new tool for new agricultural and environmental certifiers, thus stimulating this market. Research-related impacts: SHARInG-MeD will make important contributions to agricultural and environmental research, as long as in the social and economic research areas. Master and Ph.D. students, Post Doc and young researchers will be involved in the project, gaining experience and training in the new technologies and techniques, and in the multidisciplinarity. International cooperation among research groups will create strong knowledge crosslinks among the Mediterranean area and will provide a framework for future projects.