Soil Health BENCHMARKS: Monitoring approaches for evaluating soil health through indicator measurements

Soil Health BENCHMARKS, a Horizon Europe-funded initiative, seeks to establish a transparent, harmonized, and cost-effective framework for assessing soil health across Europe. This project leverages 29 European landscape case studies to co-develop a monitoring system that operates at multiple scales and engages diverse users. Collaborating with stakeholders such as land managers, policymakers, legislators, value chain businesses, and NGOs, BENCHMARKS aims to design a system tailored to specific assessment objectives, adaptable to diverse land uses, and practical for implementation.
Key deliverables include a harmonized monitoring framework, an evaluation of soil health indicators proposed by the EU Soil Mission and BENCHMARKS, an integrated soil health assessment tool, and scientific foundations for incentivization schemes targeting value-chain stakeholders. This presentation will highlight the project's monitoring approaches and provide an overview of preliminary findings, with a focus on how these efforts can contribute to soil health monitoring strategies across Europe.