Modern agriculture has succeeded in increasing productivity to meet rising demand. In this context, it is now an important task to manage soils sustainably in order to maintain or enhance soil fertility and soil quality for food production, while also providing ecosystem services through agricultural land. Accordingly, it is necessary to identify and quantify the risks of soil degradation and to develop contemporary and locally adapted soil protection and restoration strategies, as well as tools to improve soil quality. Substantial impact of research results and technological solutions should be achieved by involving technicians, farmers and policy makers to ensure that the tools and approaches provided by researchers meet the practical needs of all stakeholders.
This session will cover all aspects of soil conservation, soil remediation, and fertilization strategies in agriculture at different spatial scales. This also includes approaches to support decision-making processes and to promote the uptake of research results in agricultural practice through agricultural stakeholders. We, therefore, particularly welcome contributions in the following topics:
i) Development of innovative soil improvement measures, soil remediation and fertilization strategies, supported by smart and innovative agricultural techniques and digital decision support tools.
ii) Development of methodologies (e.g., field work, laboratory analysis, sensor development, statistical analysis, algorithms, and models) for assessing the soil quality status and erosion processes.
iii) Monitoring and modelling studies investigating agricultural system approaches to enhance the quality of soil and water for food production under different environmental conditions and scales.
iv) Socioeconomic studies on soil and water resource use and conservation policies.
We warmly invite all researchers working in the field of soil and water conservation and soil restoration to participate in this session. We particularly encourage the TUdi project consortium (EU Horizon 2020 grant agreement no. 101000224) to attend this session.