SIEUSOIL partners are continuously publishing numerous articles in peer reviewed journals and international conferences, following the project’s progress and results.

You can access all 28 SIEUSOIL scientific papers published since 2019 here.

FAO and the UN Environment Programme have issued a joint report on the “Global Assessment of Soil Pollution”.
The joint assessment found that widespread environmental degradation caused by soil pollution,
due to the growing demands of agri-food and industrial systems and an increasing global population,
is getting worse and is one of the world’s major challenges for ecosystem restoration.

Here are some interesting facts:

The much-awaited Sixth Assessment Report (AR-6) of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released on August 6^th. This report warns that within the next years increasingly extreme weather phenomena will occur, and that the key temperature limit will be broken in just over a decade. The strength of scientific certainty the AR-6 carries about climate change means that action on reducing emissions must be accelerated.

Amongst the IPCC report key points are that Global surface temperature was 1.09^oC higher in the decade between 2011-2020 than between 1850-1900, whilst the past five years have been the hottest on record since 1850. Additionally, the recent rate of sea level rise has nearly tripled compared with the period 1901-1971. Human influence is at 90% likely to be the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers and the decrease in Arctic sea-ice, since the 1990s.

It is also made clear that the warming we’ve experienced to date has caused changes to many of our planetary support systems that are irreversible on the timescales of centuries to millennia.

Compared with previous IPCC assessments, the focus of this report is mainly on solutions. It highlights links between nature and humans, including the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity, human health, food and nutrition, and adaptation options and limits.

Greenhouse gas emissions have long been known to be rising. Nonetheless, AR-6 highlights the impacts of shorter-lived greenhouse gases, especially methane. More than half of total global emissions come from human activities. More specifically 40% of those come from agriculture, 35% from fossil fuels, and 20% from waste.

The causes of climate change and the role played by agriculture and methane are by now a scientific certainty and as such clear action to reduce food-related emissions is imminent. Regarding land use intact ecosystems must be protected and degraded landscapes must be restored. Regenerative practices across the farmed landscape need to be adopted, keeping carbon in the soil through no-till cultivation, planting trees and hedgerows that sequester carbon and improve habitats at the same time.

Localised changes in land use and farming have been found to attenuate the impacts of climate change, including producing localised cooling. It is therefore very important to take action locally in averting the global crisis and ensuring a resilient locale as much as possible. This includes tree planting, resilient farming, increasing natural habitats and suppress pollutants that affect the local atmosphere.

This report is the first in a series as part of the IPCC’s sixth assessment on climate change. Upcoming reports expected to be issued in early 2022 will examine adaptation solutions to these impacts to prevent the occurrence of catastrophic scenarios.

Α holistic perspective on soil architecture as a key to soil functions

The European Journal on Soil Science has recently published an opinion article on soil structure and its role in soil functioning.

Soil functions, including climate regulation and the cycling of water and nutrients, are of central importance for a number of environmental issues of great societal concern.

To understand and manage these functions, it is crucial to be able to quantify the structure of soils, now increasingly referred to as their “architecture,” as it constrains the physical, chemical and biological processes in soils.

This quantification was traditionally approached from two different angles, one focused on aggregates of the solid phase, and the other on the pore space.

The recent development of sophisticated, non-disturbing imaging techniques has led to significant progress in the description of soil architecture, in terms of both the pore space and the spatial configuration of mineral and organic materials.

World Soil Day 2021 (#WorldSoilDay) and its campaign “Halt soil salinization, boost soil productivity” aims to raise awareness of the importance of maintaining healthy ecosystems and human well-being. This year’s World Soil Day will focus on addressing the growing challenges in soil management, fighting soil salinization, increasing soil awareness and encouraging governments, organizations, communities and individuals around the world to commit to proactively improving soil health. READ MORE

The SIEUSOIL consortium is formed by a multi-disciplinary international team of experts from 23 institutions in Europe and China, specializing on conservation agriculture, soil science, environmental engineering, data and process modelling, LCA, semantics-based data harmonization, remote sensing, IoT, sensors and data fusion, DSS, machine learning and deep learning. Our team will be more than happy to answer to your questions or provide more info on the project.

Project Coordinator: Professor Dimitrios Moshou dmoshou@auth.gr