Department of Ecoscience

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.