Nature Based Solutions for Soil Management (NBSoil) is a four-year project coordinated by the Institute of Soil Science and Plant Cultivation (IUNG-PIB) which kicked off last December 12. The Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), through the ARIES Team, has recently joined the four-year project along other three Spanish partners: AgriSat Iberia, Instituto Técnico Agronómico Provincial de Albacete (ITAP) and REVOLVE.
The overall objective of NBSoil is to design an attractive blended learning programme that enables soil advisors to apply a holistic view of soil health through nature-based solutions (NBS) and to collaborate effectively across different temporal and spatial scales.
NBSOIL will focus on 6 categories of multifunctional NBS to develop a holistic approach to land management and soil health fully in line with the IUCN Global Standard for NBS: organic fertilisers from locally available bio-waste, cover crops, paludiculture, forest diversification, bioremediation, and blue and green infrastructure in urban and peri-urban areas.
The ARIES team will be mainly involved in reviewing the existing soil-related models and assessing their complementarity, interoperability and potential integration in the modelling platform. They will then integrate the models to generate new knowledge on soil structure and its importance for soil organic matter stabilisation and hydrology, with the existing concepts on Soil Organic Matter (SOM) pools and elements from food-web models.
We’ll also develop and integrate in ARIES an NBSOIL-open library of soil biodiversity, soil functions and ecosystem service models in order to predict effectivity of the different NBS to improve soil biodiversity
Yuwei Wu
ARIES data scientist, BC3
The methodology developed and applied during the project will be incorporated to ARIES, enabling data integration, allowing the discovery of new knowledge through the products created between the different datasets, and via the potential application of logical inference.
The NBSOIL GIS tool will also be linked to the ARIES NBSOIL modules created according to the decision-making algorithms.
This will make a major impact and contribute decisively to achieving the EU Soil Health Mission by integrating NBS knowledge and advice for soil management, making soil monitoring and mapping technologies user-friendly and inclusive, and integrating soil management into all decision-making processes.
