Enabling a collaborative and holistic approach to soil conservation: Introducing ORCaSa’s Impact4Soil platform
Soils are the foundation of terrestrial ecosystems, providing a vital environment for producing food and prime materials. Soil is pivotal in climate change through carbon storage and ecosystem support. But despite their significance in ecosystems, around one-third of global soils are severely degraded, resulting in a loss of their carbon sequestration capacity and reduced fertility, productivity, and biodiversity.
Addressing the global soil crisis requires a joint effort from various stakeholders. Farmers, landowners, scientists, policymakers, and conservationists all have important roles to play in reversing soil degradation and enhancing soil carbon sequestration.
Impact4Soil enables this collaboration of different stakeholders. It brings everyone involved in soil conservation to one place, providing updated and reliable information at different levels, from the latest research findings and available data to ongoing projects and interventions. This transversal approach is showcased in the 5 modules that are integrated into the platform:
- Geospatial data
- Scientific evidence
- Practices (local initiatives)
- Network
- Datasets
Geospatial data:
Identifying the distribution of soil organic carbon and related environmental factors (from global to local scale) is key to understanding the trends and priority areas around soil conservation. This module displays a select catalog of geospatial resources from some of the most relevant and reliable sources: FAO, World Resources Institute / Global Forest Watch, ISRIC, INRAE, The Nature Conservancy, etc.
This module allows users to easily identify areas with high soil carbon density. They can also examine data for forest gain and loss, land coverage, and soil characteristics and visualize past trends and the effects of various future scenarios.
The Geospatial data module also displays state-of-the-art data products generated by the ORCaSa Research Consortium. High-resolution (10x10m) map layers modeling key biophysical indicators (aboveground biomass, carbon budget and net CO2 flux) are available for croplands in France, showcasing a powerful methodology for accurate carbon monitoring and reporting.
Scientific Evidence:
Every day, the scientific research community around the world provides updated information on the positive and negative impacts on soils. Navigating through all this information can be challenging, which is why the Scientific Evidence module is an immensely valuable tool. It has an organized catalog of over 13000 published studies and 200 meta-analyses (combination of results from multiple studies) on soil carbon that can be filtered by
- land use,
- intervention or impact,
- country,
- year,
- journal and
- publication type (primary study or meta-analysis).
What’s more, the methodology behind this module summarizes the results from all the meta-analyses to provide evidence-based estimations on the positive or negative impact that different interventions and factors have on the soil carbon stock. This allows us to identify the best and worst land use changes, climate change impacts, and management practices for soil carbon.
Practices:
Currently, many initiatives and projects on soil conservation worldwide serve as direct examples of traditional knowledge and scientific advances being applied in situ. In the Practices module, the user can locate and identify around 100 initiatives focused on soil organic carbon, tracked by WOCAT and FAO, and filter them based on relevant criteria such as country, land use type, or intervention type. The filtering is designed to match the information structure followed by the Scientific Evidence module. This was a conscious effort to create a clear parallelism between the scientific findings on soil carbon and the places where each type of effort is being applied around the world.
Network:
The Network module aims to boost collaboration between soil researchers and institutions around the world. It shows the connections between projects, institutions, and funding agencies so that any user can identify ongoing initiatives and the role of each stakeholder involved.
Moreover, users can submit new projects or institutions, contributing to the further expansion of the network.
With detailed information and connections for over 170 initiatives and 300 organizations already at the time of launch, this module has enormous potential to promote collaboration and connections between the different actors in the soils community and enhance joint efforts towards increased knowledge and sustainability in the future.
Datasets:
Finding and accessing relevant research data resources can be challenging, as the information is often dispersed between different sources. Here is where the Datasets module comes in handy. It provides search functionalities for over 700 soil carbon datasets published on the main data repositories (CIRAD, Harvard, INRAE, Joint Research Centre, and Zenodo). This enables unprecedented accessibility to the latest research data in just a few clicks.
Collaboration is the future
Each module provides accurate and valuable data on critical aspects of soil carbon for researchers, policymakers, and organizations. However, the combination of all the approaches makes Impact4Soil a genuinely unique and powerful tool. It synthesizes a broader perspective on the challenges, opportunities, and efforts in soil conservation and fosters collaboration and interaction between relevant stakeholders. This, in turn, boosts meaningful research and provides actionable information for conservation initiatives to build a more sustainable future for our soils.
The team behind Impact4Soil
The Impact4Soil platform is funded by the European Commission (HORIZON-CSA 101059863). The coordinator of the consortium is INRAE. The project was developed together with CIRAD and other partners.
Are you in soil conservation? Join the Impact4Soil community today to restore and revitalize our soil ecosystems. Register your organization and your initiative here.
