Luca Montanarella

European Commission | ec · Joint Research Centre (JRC)

The Harmonized World Soil Database version 2.0 (HWSD v2.0) is a unique global soil inventory providing information on the morphological, chemical and physical properties of soils at approximately 1 km resolution. Its main objective is to be useful for modelers and to serve as a basis for prospective studies on agroecological zoning, food security a...

Policy making and soil security require to address the sustainable management of soil resources at the landscape level. Therefore, geopedology can become highly relevant for effective policy making for achieving long term soil protection. The necessary pre-condition is the availability of a solid scientific basis and detailed data on the actual sta...

Soil health laws should account for global soil connections.

The forecasting of crop yield is one of the most critical research areas in crop science, which allows for the development of decision support systems, optimization of nitrogen fertilization, and food safety. Many tested modelling approaches can be differentiated according to the models and data used. The models used are traditional crop models tha...

This chapter reviews the challenges in ensuring that soil health (particularly soil organic carbon as a key component of soil health) is fully recognised and integrated into relevant global and regional agreements, legislation and policy. As a case study it assesses the development, progress and current limitations of the EU Soil Thematic Strategy....

The European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC), hosted by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), is the focal point for soil data, support to policy making and awareness raising for the European Union (EU). Established in 2006 to provide harmonised soil related information for the EU Member States, ESDAC currently hosts 88 datasets, 6,000 ma...

Land degradation is the persistent reduction in the capacity of the land to support human and other life on Earth (IPBES 2018). This process jeopardizes the provision of ecosystem services. The SDG 15, Life on Land, includes efforts to sustainably manage and recover natural ecosystems and restore degraded land and soil. Under the umbrella of SDG 15...

Soils form the basis for agricultural production and other ecosystem services, and soil management should aim at improving their quality and resilience. Within the SoilCare project, the concept of soil-improving cropping systems (SICS) was developed as a holistic approach to facilitate the adoption of soil management that is sustainable and profita...

Soils provide crucial ecosystem services such as the provision of food, carbon sequestration and water purification. Soil is the largest terrestrial pool of carbon, hosts more than 25% of all biodiversity and provides 95–99% of food to 8 billion people. The European Union (EU) puts the concept of healthy soils at the core of the European Green Deal...

We present the developments on soil erosion modelling at European scale to respond to the policy needs. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission has developed the European Soil Erosion Modelling Platform (EUSEMP) to support the agro-environmental policies in the European Union (EU). The major component of EUSEMP is an hybrid soil...

Soil security has emerged during the recent years as a new paradigm for addressing sustainable soil management. Soil security was first presented in the literature in 2013-2014 (Koch et al., 2013; McBratney et al. 2014). Both publications defined soil security as the maintenance and improvement of the world’s soil resources so that they can continu...

Black Soils have attracted renewed attention from policy-makers and the public thanks to strong interest from China; an International Network on Black Soils was launched in 2017 and the first plenary meeting held in Harbin in 2018. The Chernozem originally defined by Dokuchaev in 1883 is the central concept of Black Soils but, more than 140 years o...

Copper-based fungicides (Cuf) are used in European (EU) vineyards to prevent fungal diseases. Soil physicochemical properties locally govern the variation of the total copper content (Cut) in EU vineyards. However, variables controlling Cut distribution at a larger scale are poorly known. Here, machine learning techniques were used to identify gove...

Voluntary soil protection measures are not sufficient to achieve sustainable soil management at a global scale. Additionally, binding soil protection legislation at national and international levels has also proved to be insufficient for the effective protection of this non-renewable natural resource. In 2012, the FAO Members established the Global...

Mapping of surface soil Hg concentrations, a priority pollutant, at continental scale is important in order to identify hotspots of soil Hg distribution (e.g. mining or industrial pollution) and identify factors that influence soil Hg concentrations (e.g. climate, soil properties, vegetation). Here we present soil Hg concentrations from the LUCAS t...

A monitoring and indicator system can inform policy

Soils play a central role in achieving sustainable development. The new European Green Deal is addressing all policy areas relevant to sustainable soil management: climate change, biodiversity, agriculture and desertification, including sustainable water management, are necessarily at the core of the European policies. Consistently addressing soil...

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) identify the need to restore degraded soils in order to improve productivity and the provision of ecosystem services. The aim is to support food production, store and supply clean water, conserve biodiversity, sequester carbon, and improve soil resilience in a context of climate change. Within this framew...

Protecting the structure and functioning of soil ecosystems is one of the central aims of current regulations of chemicals. This is, for instance, shown by the emphasis on the protection of key drivers and ecosystem services as proposed in the protection goal options for soil organisms by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Such targets requ...

Abstract The novelty of this study lies in the analyses of legislation concerning land use policies by examining the specific boundary between land ownership and land take. The basic motive was that the European Commission (EC) withdrew the Soil Framework Directive (SFD) in 2014 following the objections of certain Member States (MS) who countered t...

Significance We use the latest projections of climate and land use change to assess potential global soil erosion rates by water to address policy questions; working toward the goals of the United Nations working groups under the Inter-Governmental Technical Panel on Soils of the Global Soil Partnership. This effort will enable policy makers to exp...

The new European Green Deal has the ambition to make the European Union the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. The European Commission presented an ambitious package of measures within the Biodiversity Strategy 2030, the Farm to Fork and the European Climate Law including actions to protect our soils. The Farm to Fork strategy addresses soil...

Soil erosion is one of the eight threats in the Soil Thematic Strategy, the main policy instrument dedicated to soil protection in the European Union (EU). During the last decade, soil erosion indicators have been included in monitoring the performance of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the progress towards the Sustainable Development Goal...

>>>Free read-only version: https://rdcu.be/b1tMU <<< The assessment of land degradation and restoration by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that land degradation across the globe is a wide and severe issue and is showing no signs of slowing down. This trend must be halted and reversed.

Peatlands have long been unrecognized or ignored, but they will play a crucial role in climate change and water security and must be a focus of policy and research

Soil mapping is an essential method for obtaining a spatial overview of soil resources that are increasingly threatened by environmental change and population pressure. Despite recent advances in digital soil- mapping techniques based on inference, such methods are still immature for large-scale soil mapping. During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, soil...

The world's largest afforestation programs implemented by China made a great contribution to the global “greening up.” These programs have received worldwide attention due to its contribution towards achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. However, emerging studies have suggested that these campaigns, when not properly implement...

This paper presents the second part of the mapping of topsoil properties based on the Land Use and Cover Area frame Survey (LUCAS). The first part described the physical properties (Ballabio et al., 2016) while this second part includes the following chemical properties: pH, Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC), calcium carbonates (CaCO3), C:N ratio, nit...

A summary presenting the challenges for soil carbon sequestration research, hypothesis to be further tested and key research (and innovation) products.

Employing a linkage between a biophysical and an economic model, this study estimates the economic impact of soil erosion by water on the world economy. The global biophysical model estimates soil erosion rates, which are converted into land productivity losses and subsequently inserted into a global market simulation model. The headline result is...

Employing a linkage between a biophysical and an economic model, this study estimates the economic impact of soil erosion by water on the world economy. The global biophysical model estimates soil erosion rates, which are converted into land productivity losses and subsequently inserted into a global market simulation model. The headline result is...

Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by 193 Governments at the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2015 for achievement by 2030. These SDGs present a roadmap to a sustainable future and a challenge to the science community. To guide activities and check progress, targets and indicators have been and are still being defi...

Soil mapping is an essential method to obtain a spatial overview of soil resources that are increasingly threatened by environmental change and population pressure. Despite recent advances in digital soil mapping techniques based on inference, such methods are still immature for large-scale soil mapping. During the 1970s, 80s and 90s, soil scientis...

Many factors threaten European Soils, and currently, all the Member States (MS) are introducing many types of soil protection measures. Erosion, pollution, sealing and decline of the organic matter are just some of the threats that affect one of the primary non-removable resources of the planet. Soils play a vital role in the biodiversity and are t...

Human activities are accelerating global biodiversity change and have resulted in severely threatened ecosystem services. A large proportion of terrestrial biodiversity is harbored by soil, but soil biodiversity has been neglected from many global biodiversity assessments and conservation actions, and our understanding of global patterns of soil bi...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have recognised the importance of soils to produce food and ensure healthy life. Sustainability has been discussed in scientific and policy forums for the last 30 years. Among others, population growth, climate change and the increase in food demand caused the emergence of sustainable agricultural food produ...

Understanding of the processes governing soil organic carbon turnover is confounded by the fact that C feedbacks driven by soil erosion have not yet been fully explored at large scale. However, in a changing climate, variation in rainfall erosivity (and hence soil erosion) may change the amount of C displacement, hence inducing feedbacks onto the l...

ATLAS DE SOLOS DA AMÉRICA LATINA E DO CARIBE, VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS DO BRASIL

Copper (Cu) distribution in soil is influenced by climatic, geological and pedological factors. Apart from geological sources and industrial pollution, other anthropogenic sources, related to the agricultural activity, may increase copper levels in soils, especially in permanent crops such as olive groves and vineyards. This study uses 21,682 soil...

In the European Union (EU), copper concentration in agricultural soil stems from anthropogenic activities and natural sources (soil and geology). This manuscript reports a statistical comparison of copper concentrations at different levels of administrative units, with a focus on agricultural areas. Anthropogenic sources of diffuse copper contamina...

This study combines two unprecedentedly high resolution (250 × 250 m) maps of soil erosion (inter‐rill and rill processes) and soil organic carbon to calculate a global estimate of erosion‐induced organic carbon (C) displacement. The results indicate a gross C displacement by soil erosion of 2.5 (+0.5/ -0.3) Pg C/year. The greatest share of displac...

Here we present an unprecedentedly high resolution (250×250 m) global potential soil erosion model, using a combination of remote sensing, GIS modelling and census data. The estimates of the potential rates of soil displacement by water erosion are provided for the land surface of 202 countries (ca. 2.89 billion cells; ~125 million km2); covering ~...

There has been the recognition that trans-national binding legal agreements related to soils are very difficult to achieve, given the sensitivities related to national sovereignty in relation to land and soils. However, the Soil Thematic Strategy played an important role to raise the awareness of soil importance, integrate soils in different policy...

The soils of the Mediterranean Basin are the products of soil processes that have been governed by a unique convergence of highly differentiated natural and anthropogenic drivers. These soils are expected to be dramatically affected by future climate and societal changes. These changes imply that suitable adaptive management strategies for these re...

Much research has been carried out on modelling soil erosion rates under different climatic and land use conditions. While some studies have addressed the issue of reduced crop productivity due to soil erosion, few have focused on the economic loss in terms of agricultural production and Gross Domestic Product(GDP). In this study, soil erosion mode...

The adoption of the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) listed in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by the United Nations urged the scientific community to generate information for planning and monitoring socioeconomic development and the underlying environmental compartments. SDGs 2, 3, 6, 11, 13, 14, and 15 have targets which commen...

Human activity and related land use change are the primary cause of accelerated soil erosion, which has substantial implications for nutrient and carbon cycling, land productivity and in turn, worldwide socio-economic conditions. Here we present an unprecedentedly high resolution (250×250m) global potential soil erosion model, using a combination o...

Legacy soil data have been produced over 70 years in nearly all countries of the world. Unfortunately, data, information and knowledge are still currently fragmented and at risk of getting lost if they remain in a paper format. To process this legacy data into consistent, spatially explicit and continuous global soil information, data are being res...

A lot of scientific knowledge is available on soils in Europe and in the world. Yet, only a fraction of this knowledge reaches policy makers and is actually used in the national and global soil policy development processes. Despite the plethora of soil data and information generated by the soil science community, only a fraction of this information...

Smoke on Water is a Rapid Response Assessment that looks at peatland location, extent, threats and the policies to manage and protect them. The goal of this rapid response assessment, carried out on behalf of UN Environment and based on the efforts of more than 30 contributors, is to raise awareness about the importance of the world's peatlands and...

Approval for glyphosate-based herbicides in the European Union (EU) is under intense debate due to concern about their effects on the environment and human health. The occurrence of glyphosate residues in European water bodies is rather well documented whereas only few, fragmented and outdated information is available for European soils. We provide...

Soils underpin our existence through food production and represent the largest terrestrial carbon store. Understanding soil state-and-change in response to climate and land use change is a major challenge. Our aim is to bridge the science-policy interface by developing a natural capital accounting structure for soil, for example, attempting a mass...