SOPHIE supports the realisation of qualified soil hydro-physics (SHP) data, highly needed in EU policy making, coming from EU-wide agreed, preferred, and innovated cost-effective laboratory- and field methods, accomplished through international collaboration. Soil Hydro-Physics (SHP) properties are the properties that determine the Soil-Water-interactions: i. water flow and water retention, and ii. with the water flow the transport of dissolved compounds, like nitrogen, phosphates, pesticides, antibiotics, and organics. SHP-properties play an important role in variety of societal issues: Crop water stress vs. food security, soil salinity and sodicity, susceptibility for forest fires, soil compaction, dike stability, greenhouse gas emissions, soil health, among others. The need for reliable SHP-properties is thus widely emphasized by researchers and consultants. However, concurrently it is recognized that harmonization, and the development of new techniques is difficult to accomplish.
This is due to the missing attention and missing direct visibility of SHP-properties in the societal topics they address. As a result current methods remain time consuming. They need to be improved towards cost-effective methods, and should be sufficiently harmonized to be used on EU-scale research. There are many opportunities to markedly improve the situation, but these require large scale adaptation, validation and standardization. One example is the adaptation, and innovation towards novel remote and proximal sensing techniques. When they are used in combination with modern field and laboratory techniques, they can lead to standardized SHP-properties, directly usable to faster extend current soil data bases, like LUCAS, and in large scale studies. The INSPIRATION meeting on Dec, 6th 2017 in Brussels, was used to build upon commitment among policy makers, manufacturers, developers, researchers, and users. SOPHIE’s motivation and approach was underlined almost unanimously duri ng the workshop, and it was concluded that SOPHIE should be extended. The University of Liège, located in Gembloux, Belgium organized a SOPHIE workshop on January 30th 2019 to exchange knowledge about the use of reference samples for SHP measurements. This open splinter meeting is setup to further discuss a draft research agenda and gather interest from researchers working with soil hydro-physics data.