Bundle maps of soil based ecosystem services, soil threats and soil health at the European scale: What do you need to now to use them?

Without soil, no life on terrestrial earth is possible as soil is at the base of many ecosystem services. Nevertheless, 60 to 70% of the EU-soils are unhealthy as they are submitted to several threats. As a result, many soil-based ecosystem services and soil threats have been mapped at the EU-level these last two decades. However, they were generally mapped one by one when they obviously interact. One way to represent these interactions is the use of bundle that is a representation of the co-occurrence of soil threats or soil-based ecosystem services in space and time. In that context, one of the objective of the SERENA EJP-SOIL project was to evaluate how to create bundles of soil-based ecosystem services and soil threats at the EU-level. This necessitate choosing indicators to evaluate the various soil threats and soil-based ecosystem services, databases, thresholds, a method to calculate the bundles. All these aspects will be explored before presenting a few bundle maps and discussing their interest for EU-soil management and the future soil monitoring law.

About the lecturer

Sophie Cornu is a pedologist investigating large-scale soil evolution in Europe, convinced by her experiences and results that soil characteristics can no longer be considered as constant on a multi-decadal to secular time scale. On that time scale, soils should be considered as a dynamic body which requires more quantification, kinetic analysis and modelling of their processes in order to consider their evolution in sustainable agriculture approaches and climate change adaptation/mitigation.