Background and Objective

The overall goal of the EJP SOIL is to build a sustainable European integrated research system on agricultural soils and develop and deploy a reference framework on climate-smart sustainable agricultural soil management. This will create the enabling environment that will maximise the contribution of agricultural soil to key societal challenges such as food and water security, sustainable agricultural production, climate change
adaptation and mitigation; ecosystem services delivery, biodiversity preservation and human health.

Approach

The European Joint Programme SOIL will include joint programming and execution of research and other joint
integrative activities such as education and training (e.g. short-term missions, workshops), knowledge management, access to experimental facilities and databases, including also harmonisation, standardisation of soil data. The Thünen Institute plays the central role for Germany as a member of EJP soil and is working on various sub-projects within EJP SOIL.

Sub-project CarboSeq:

Carbon sequestration in soils is a natural process that must be actively promoted in order to reduce the effects of climate change on soil quality and thus enabling a more climate-friendly and sustainable soil management. To promote this process in a targeted manner, a comprehensive assessment of the additional quantity of organic carbon that can be stored in the soil with the help of agrcultural management options. This information is currently lacking for European soils and therefore the aim of CarboSeq is to estimate a realizable additional carbon storage potential across Europe, taking into account technical and economic restrictions.

More on this topic here.

Sub-project MaxRoot-C:

To combat climate change it is indispensable to reduce CO₂ emissions from the agricultural sector and to bind carbon in the soil compensating for those emissions. This requires a transformation towards cropping systems which are equally profitable but sequester more carbon as the current systems. The most viable yet neglected option is through increased and deeper roots of main and cover crops. The project MaxRoot-C will pioneer assessment methods closing the existing knowledge gaps by providing robust data on root C inputs of main crop varieties and different cover crops across Europe, to determine if and how genotype selection is a useful tool to increase long-term soil carbon stocks and quantify the C sequestering potential therein. It will provide policy relevant data contributing to the development of future carbon sequestration methods of agricultural soils by improved variety selection on which to base future common agricultural policy.

More on this topic here.

Links and Downloads

www.ejpsoil.eu