iSQAPER - Interactive Soil Quality Assessment in Europe and China for Agricultural Productivity and Environmental Resilience

Objective

Increasingly, soil is recognized as a non-renewable resource because, once degraded, the restoration of its productivity is an extremely slow process. 

Given the importance of soils for crop and livestock production as well as for providing wider ecosystem services for local and global societies, maintaining the land in good condition is of vital importance.

To manage the use of agricultural soils well, decision-makers need science-based, easy to apply and cost-effective tools to assess soil quality and function.

The most important aims the iSqaper project will work on are to:

• Integrate existing soil quality related information
• Synthesize the evidence for agricultural management effects provided by long-term field trials
• Derive and identify innovative soil quality indicators that can be integrated into an easy-to-use interactive soil quality assessment tool
• Develop, with input from a variety of stakeholders, a multilingual Soil Quality Application (SQAPP) for in-field soil quality assessment and monitoring
• Test, refine, and roll out SQAPP across Europe and China as a new standard for holistic assessment of agricultural soil quality
• Use a trans-disciplinary, multi-actor approach to validate and support SQAPP

Project duration

From 2015-05-01 to 2020-04-30

Project website and twitter

http://www.isqaper-project.eu/
@iSQAPER
http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/193347_en.html