BC3 has recently joined the four-year project NBSOIL, which stands for Nature-Based Solutions for Soil Management. NBSOIL, which officially kicked off last December 12, is coordinated by the Institute of Soil Science and Plant Cultivation (IUNG-PIB), along AgriSat Iberia, Instituto Técnico Agronómico Provincial de Albacete (ITAP) and REVOLVE.

The aim of NBSOIL is to create and test a learning pathway for existing and aspiring soil advisors – providing them with the necessary tools and knowledge to develop a holistic and nature-based solutions approach to soil.

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.

BC3 will be mainly involved in reviewing the existing soil-related models and assessing their complementarity, interoperability and potential integration in the ARIES modelling platform.

“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 the effectiveness of the different NBS to improve soil biodiversity.” Yuwei Wu, BC3 Technician & ARIES Hydrology Specialist.

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.