Accelerating collection and use of soil health information using AI technology (AI4SoilHealth)

Challenge

We all depend on good soils. When healthy they capture carbon, improve yields, reduce flooding, and boost biodiversity.
But soils are under pressure from current farming practices, and the challenges are only increasing with the growing demand for food production.
Threats to soil health include loss of organic matter, loss of biodiversity, soil compaction from large machinery and loss of soil itself due to erosion.
It is estimated that between 60 and 70% of the EU’s soils are unhealthy.

Aim 

If we want to reverse this trend, we need to understand which practices work and which do not. The climate crisis does not leave us much room for mistakes, and soil is complex. So we need to be able to map changes into the future so we can make the right plan for the right locality. For this people need the right measurement tools. The right tools will give land managers and policy makers the confidence to make changes to their farming practices which improve soil health and resilience.

Action

AI4SoilHealth project will create a free app that combines Artificial Intelligence and the latest soil health measurement techniques to help farmers and growers across Europe make changes to their management practices. To this project partners will spend the next 3 years collecting data from farms and pilot sites across Europe to build a model for this to work from. Along the way we will share our learning, educating people about the latest soil health measurement techniques and sharing stories from the European soil practitioner community.

Role of IIASA

Within the AI4SoilHealth IIASA’s research team contributes to the assessment of current soil-related policies, links to stakeholders, and identifies policies that facilitate implementation of the Soil Strategy, Green Deal strategies and other relevant agreements, soil health indicator identification, selection, and testing, development, and application of tools and methods for consistent pan-European soil monitoring, and upscale them to produce operational harmonized data services, and finally also to communication of messages, methods and tools among target stakeholders, policy-makers and the general public.

The key research focus of IIASA is on the development and application of AI-based open-source tools and methods for consistent pan-European soil monitoring, and upscale them to produce operational harmonized data services with a particular focus on the development of forecasting services for robust predictions of the soil health indicators and soil functions for the baseline year 2020 and future time horizons of 2030, 2050, 2100 and spatial downscaling of the predictions with fine-grained geo-spatial covariates for climate, terrain, and soil.