EUdaphobase

European authorities and stakeholders urgently need reliable tools for monitoring and evaluating the environmental condition of soils within policy assessment in context of numerous EU directives. The focus of the EUdaphobase Action is on creating the structures and procedures necessary for developing an open Europe-wide soil biodiversity data infrastructure.

The ultimate goal of EUdaphobase is to establish a pan-European soil-biological data and knowledge warehouse, which can be used for understanding, protecting and sustainably managing soils, their biodiversity and functions. A focal approach is to combine available soil biota’s distributional & trait data with indispensable environmental metadata to gain insight into functional relationships in soils and to predict the state of ecosystem services (ESS).

The activities follow an information flow from data providers to users of assessment tools. The data warehouse will host and allow open sharing of data. Intermediate in the project is developing standardized terminologies, data quality-control protocols and ecological traits used as proxies for soil ESS. The Action will curate, harmonize, quality check and standardize existing data according to protocols agreed upon during the Action.

Innovative procedures to operationalize assessments of the state of soil concerning biodiversity and ESS will be offered. For this, specific analytical tools will be developed for applied uses of policy, management and regulatory agencies. These tools will recognize and visualize (i.e. on maps) functional biological characteristics of soils related to type, use and management practices as well as determine and delineate ecosystem services, baselines, relationships and set the basis for forecasting changes.

Background

Soil protection is a highly emphasized topic in Europe despite the absence of a European Soil Framework Directive. Many soil functions leading to ecosystem services are biotically driven, so that soil protection requires coordinated efforts for the evaluation of soil biota throughout Europe. However, without proper baseline data and reliable tools for soil-state assessment, it is currently difficult, if not impossible, to efficiently address such goals.

Procedures for establishing baselines and assessing current states of soil biodiversity must be based on existing data and knowledge, preferably accumulated from national or local databanks. Throughout Europe abundant soil biodiversity information exists, whose common potential has yet to be collated or explored.

Main Objectives

The main goal of this Action is to create the structures, capacities and procedures necessary for expanding an existing data platform on soil fauna (“Edaphobase“) into an open, publicly available data warehouse for Europe-wide soil biodiversity data as well as for developing tools that use and evaluate this data. The Action focusses on combining available soil biota’s distributional & trait data with indispensable environmental metadata while integrating data on soil microorganisms and soil fauna. The activities follow an information flow from data providers to data users:

• Collate, harmonize, quality check and curate existing data according to agreed upon standardized terminologies and ontologies, data quality-control procedures and data-upload protocols.
• Integrate data on ecological traits for use as proxies for soil biota’s functionalities to gain insight into functional relationships in soils and to predict the state of biotically driven ecosystem services.
• Based on the applied needs of policy, management and regulatory agencies, adapt specific data-modelling algorithms for developing assessment tools that can recognize and visualize (i.e. on maps) functional biological characteristics of soils related to type, use and management practices.

Use and Impact

The soil biodiversity data infrastructure can be used to operationalize and ensure more efficient and knowledge-based assessment of soil biodiversity, functions, quality and health as well as determine and delineate ecosystem services, baselines, relationships and set the basis for forecasting changes.