The SoilPath project, with a budget of six million euros and a five-year duration, aims to provide farmers, researchers, advisors, and policymakers with updated knowledge and practical tools to understand and improve soil health. The initiative brings together partners from Belgium, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia, and Sweden, led by Ghent University.
UVigo participates through the Research Group Plant, Soil and By-product Valorisation and the Institute of Agroecology and Food, with the team from the Faculty of Sciences on the Ourense campus led by Antía Gómez and Daniel Arenas. The Galician Business-University Foundation (Feuga) is also part of the consortium. The project, funded by the European Union through the Horizon Europe program, recently held its launch event in Ghent, Belgium.
The core idea of the project is to quantify the impact of agricultural practices on soil health, as it is estimated that 60-70% of EU soils are in an unhealthy condition, affecting agricultural production, water regulation, carbon storage, and biodiversity.
SoilPath will be developed in several stages: information will be compiled into a knowledge base on over 100 agricultural practices; the effect of these practices will be quantitatively analyzed, including combinations and synergies; and finally, it will be integrated into an evolution of the Open Soil Index (OSI) to develop maps, models, and decision support tools.
For farmers and advisors, a Field Actors Toolbox will be created with technical sheets and a digital decision support system (SHAI). For policymakers, there will be a Policymakers Toolbox with policy analyses and recommendations. All these resources will be integrated into the digital hub SoilPATHways.
The University of Vigo will lead the work package dedicated to quantifying the impact of individual agricultural practices on soil health and environmental sustainability, transforming data into quantitative evidence. Additionally, a multi-year trial in Galicia will be included to contrast scientific evidence with experimental results obtained under different European pedoclimatic conditions.
The project stands out for its applied orientation, seeking to quantify the effects of agricultural practices and convert them into usable information for decision-making. Both individual and combined practices will be analyzed, and chemical, physical, and biological soil properties will be evaluated, relating them to the ecosystem services the soil provides.
