WP 3| Developing Soil Health Indicators and Thresholds

Lead ETH-Z, with support from IITA, CIRAD, UKCEH, UNISS, WU, ISRIC, FARA, MATE, ICARDA. T3.2 will undertake a comprehensive review of soil health (monitoring) programs in Africa, the EU, and globally. The review process will explore modelling and monitoring approaches and feasibility of existing soil health indicators and thresholds applied in different environments, regions, and scales and for different land use cases and land management scenarios, and data requirements (against existing T3.1 and new WP5 datasets). This task will build on the work of Visscher et al. (in prep.), which defined a holistic framework to bridge soil health gaps in the Global South. The results of this task will be presented as a review report on soil health indicators and knowledge gaps in Africa (D3.2).

Lead CIRAD, with support from ETH-Z, FARA, IITA, UKCEH, UNISS, WU, MATE, ICARDA and national partners:
CSIR, INP, IRAD, ICRA, MoA, KALRO, DLRC, ZARI, CSRI, INIDA, FOFIFA
Building on the work of BENMARKS and AI4SoilHealth, T3.3 will determine appropriate, variable descriptors of soil
health in Africa and subsequently define soil health indicators and thresholds for monitoring soil health in different
environments, regions, and scales (national, regional, and continental). Three lines of evidence will be used and combined
to identify relevant indicators and thresholds:

1. The international scientific knowledge and consensus on the concept and related indicators and thresholds currently used to assess soil health, as for instance those already considered in the EUSO soil health dashboard;

2. The specific knowledge about soil health in Africa published in the scientific literature as well as the one shared by African and international scientific institutions involved in the project;

3. The field knowledge of local stakeholders (landowners and managers, but also representatives of national governments, private companies, non-governmental organizations, etc.) will be complementary accounted for thanks to close and on-going interactions between project tasks 3.3 and 6.1 from the start of the second year of the project (see the Gantt chart).

In an indicator report (D3.3), T3.3 will define the various components of soil health, including soil organic carbon, nutrients (incl. nonresponsive soils to fertilizer inputs), soil biodiversity, salinization, sodification, soil pollution, available soil micronutrients, erosion, and acidification and their associated data requirements. These components will be considered in an integrated manner to assess their impact on soil functions that support ecosystem services. T3.3 will coopt postgraduate fellows from African Institutions to work on the project, study and publish results, as part of AUSO’s capacity strengthening.

Lead CIRAD, partners: ETH-Z, IITA, UKCEH, UNISS, WU, FARA, ISRIC, ICARDA. T3.4 will consider the stakeholders’ objectives and contexts and develop cognitive models that will link soil health indicators to soil functions and soil functional properties. T3.4 will define and apply a harmonized system of selecting and aggregating soil health indicators and develop evidence-driven analytical indicator framework for monitoring soil health using examples from BENCHMARKS, Soils4Med, AI4SH and iSQAPER projects. It will also link the indicator framework with ASDAC and AUSO (WP4) for the development of a Soil Health Index (D3.4) and a scalable soil health dashboard for Africa.

As a first step, we effectively plan to develop a single and generic framework working for the whole continent, as was done in the EUSO soil health dashboard. The comprehensive review that will be made in the Task 3.2 along with close and ongoing interactions with local stakeholders expected through the connection between the WPs 3 and 6 might lead to the development of specific indicators (e.g. salinization in the Sahelian part) and/or specific aggregation of indicators for some African regions. This decision will be made as we go along and at last by the end of the third year of the project according to the Gantt chart.

Lead ETH-Z, partners: IITA, CIRAD, UKCEH, UNISS, WU, ICARDA, National partners: CSIR, INP, IRAD, ICRA, MoA, KALRO, DLRC, ZARI, CSRI, INIDA, FOFIFA. T3.5 will translate the indicator framework from T3.4 into a monitoring plan (D3.5) that will recommend the type of data national partners will collect, at what locations and intervals, and how it will be verified, sampled, and tested. Furthermore, it will align with a network of field sites on which long-term monitoring of soil health will take place (in collaboration with stakeholders such as OCP and IFDC, and partners such as IITA and national partners).

The result of T3.5 will be an approach and scripts for soil health monitoring across scales, through soil health indices, including a scientific paper. T3.5 will inform WP5 on data management. The data collection will take place under WP5 (T5.3), to provide a baseline dataset for soil health monitoring, and fill the data gaps identified in Task 3.1. It will follow the methods developed in Task 3.2 -3.4. Noting that changes in soil health are only observed after long term application of adjusted practices and policies, the long term soil health monitoring program of T3.5 will provide the approach to repeated data collection that may extend beyond the duration of the current project