Challenges
As the interim report of the EU Mission Board for Soil health and food states “Soils provide us with nutritious food and other products as well as with clean water and flourishing habitats for biodiversity. At the same time, soils can help slow the onset of climate change and make us more resilient to extreme climate events such as droughts and floods. Soils preserve our cultural heritage and are a key part of the landscapes that we all cherish. Simply put, healthy living soils keep us, and the world around us, alive.”
There is an imperative to protect soils, improve soil health and identify the roles and contributions of Scotland’s soils in delivering key beneficial services. However, there is currently a lack of knowledge of the mechanistic understanding of how the complex interactions of soil deliver individual and interlinked functions. Also, the definition of soil function and the determination of its boundaries is not a simple task. Soil functions are described as the flows and transformations of mass, energy, and genetic information that connect soil to the wider critical zone, transmitting the impacts of human activity at the land surface and providing a control point for beneficial human intervention. As a result, the soil functional outcome is a result of interactions among physical, chemical, biological including human factors.
Further advances in knowledge are required to understand
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How complex soil interactions and functions can continue to provide societal benefits
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How to protect soils through the development of new management practices
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To support the monitoring of Scotland’s soil health and measure the vulnerability of Scottish soils to existing and future perturbations
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To offer nature-based solutions for the remediation and protection of soil
Questions
- What are the roles and contributions of Scotland’s soils in delivering key ecosystem services such as net greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, food production, biodiversity, flood regulation, water availability and water quality?
- How do we apply this knowledge to effectively target resources and interventions to maximize soil protection whilst ensuring soils can continue to deliver key ecosystem services including co-benefits?
- How can we best use Nature-based Solutions to protect our soils and achieve sustainable soil management?
Solutions
This project delivers new insights and knowledge on the role of Scottish soils, and the benefits they confer, as well as identifying and developing strategies to mitigate degradation, reduce loss and enhance soil health.
Soil Ecosystem Services (Lead: Eric Paterson)
We are gaining a deeper understanding of which soil functions are regulated by intrinsic soil properties in several Scottish ecosystems, and how management can drive changes in function and ecosystem service delivery. Soils will be characterised across contrasting land types and managements to assess functional capacity underpinning ecosystem services essential to gain an understanding of the multifunctionality of soils. New research and data synthesis will identify and validate emerging land management practices to maintain and improve soil health, identify potential indicators of improvement, and quantify trade-offs between soil functions impacting ecosystem service delivery. Linkages between biogeochemical processes, plant genotype, and soil biology (e.g. microbiome) that underpin GHG fluxes and plant productivity will be explored.
Soil Protection and Management (Lead: Tracy Valentine)
This project seeks to protect soils through the development of sustainable soil management practices implemented across multiple environments. This is being achieved via innovations in soil management techniques or by increasing systems-based understanding of the impact of management combinations, including nature-based solutions to generate, for example, disease-suppressive soils. The impacts of adopting these techniques are being assessed through existing and innovative monitoring methodologies.
Assessing Scotland’s soil health (Lead: Nikki Baggaley)
We are assessing the impacts of adopting different management techniques through existing and innovative monitoring methodologies. This involves validating a suite of indicators across a range of soils and sectors and evaluating new indicators based on novel techniques relevant to specific ecosystems and land management (agriculture, urban, forestry and upland habitats). Assessing indicators is crucial for evaluating their suitability for a national monitoring framework to support land-based businesses in managing soil sustainably across land use sectors and providing practical management interventions. This activity supports the Centrepeat and Integrated socio-environmental modelling of policy scenarios for Scotland projects which are establishing a soil monitoring framework.
Informing on the importance of Scottish Soils (Lead: Ken Loades)
This project is creating a Scottish Soils Network to disseminate the outcomes of this project to the right audience, in the right language and the right format. We aim to serve as a single conduit for soils-based Knowledge Exchange with the overriding aim to collate and publicise outputs from not only this project but also the Centrepeat project, and others. This supported by a range of activities including:
- A Scottish Soils Network bulletin summarizing recent findings
- Disseminating outcomes at high-profile events
- Organising an annual Scottish Soils Network workshop and conference
- Developing online summary case studies, blogs, and podcasts
- Iterative development of a data dashboard and virtual tour
- Stakeholder engagement, for example, mobile phone app testing, technosols and agricultural practitioners
Outputs generated by the project are being periodically added to the project's online repository.
Overall, this project delivers data underpinning significant advances in our scientific understanding of soil function and the complex role that soil has in contributing to ecosystem services. This is helping us to develop strategies for sustainable management and minimization of degradation and loss of Scotland’s soils.
Project Partners
Progress
Healthy Soils benefits from several research platforms managed by the James Hutton Institute (JHI) and Scotland's Rural College (SRUC) and has access to Universal Naming Convention (UNC) supported resources (e.g., Nullsoft Scriptable Install System [NSIS]), and therefore cuts across the Strategic Research Programme through research interactions with Themes A to D and F, that focus on plant and animal health, sustainable food system and supply, human impacts on the environment, natural resources and horizon scanning. Data were collected throughout Year 1 to establish baselines for use throughout Healthy Soils. Outputs to date include: i) statistical correlations were found between the concentration of individual minerals with ε, a proxy for soil carbon decomposition. The laboratory finding that kaolinite is associated with decreased soil carbon decomposition was validated under field conditions at national scale; ii) for soil imaging/remote monitoring, a colour correction method was developed to identity a colour correction card, extract pixel colour ratios and use these to correct the colour balance for pixels of different colour and intensity across each soil image; iii) DeNitrification DeComposition (DNDC) model simulations demonstrated the impact of management practices on soil carbon and showed significant differences between conventional and sustainable management treatments at Balruddery (JHI), which aligned with ground-truth data; iv) regarding climate and environmental drivers, impacts of freezing were initially more impactful, but heating had a longer lasting effect on soil functional ability and variation in water availability affected rhizosphere metagenome composition across potato genotypes; and N2O emissions from soils varied as a function of grass genotype; v) for indicators of soil health, soil organic matter criteria of 'good', 'moderate' and 'poor' needs refined for upland sites.
Healthy Soils contributed to several (inter)national policy domains. For forestry this included provision of expert knowledge from the latest research on tree planting, carbon storage and biodiversity to inform Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe). Through committee membership, e.g., DEFRA Trees and Woodlands and NatureScot Science Advisory Committees, expert knowledge and opinion on potential soil carbon losses that occur following tree-planting on upland, carbon rich soil was provided. With regards to agricultural production and biodiversity, contributions to public consultations on the draft Scottish Government (SG) Agricultural Bill, SG Biodiversity Strategy and provision of expert knowledge and opinion on proposals for SG Enhanced Conditionality Payments has been provided. A report on the status and research priorities for Soil Ecosystem Services was produced and several presentations given to SG Soil Awareness meetings. Healthy Soils members chair the UK Expert Group on Organic Production which advises the Four Nations Working Group on Organic Production; and act as vice-chair of the Sustainable Agricultural Working Group of the EU's European Technology Platform for Plants for the Future (commonly known as Plant ETP) which provides strategic direction and recommendations to stakeholders throughout agricultural value chains including policymakers and practitioners.
To ensure effective communication a project logo has been designed and have been used in all engagement activities. The Soil Sentinel has been launched and is available to direct subscribers, via the SEFARI Gateway as well as the Scottish Soils website, that has been coordinated with the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). SEFARI Gateway funding was leveraged to showcase Healthy Soils research at the World Congress of Soil Science (WCSS) in Glasgow. The project also had a presence at the Royal Highland Show, Arable Scotland, and Potatoes in Practice. A Healthy Soils community on Zenodo and Healthy Soils YouTube channel have been established to increase project visibility.
A unique opportunity for creating impact across the range of audiences of Healthy Soils was the hosting of the 22nd World Congress of Soil Science (WCSS) in Glasgow during August 2022. With over 3,000 attendees, the WCSS was a significant component of the coordinated approach of Healthy Soils to raising understanding of approaches and challenges for achieving policy aims of net zero GHG emissions and reversing the loss of biodiversity amongst audiences in science policy, practice, and science from across the globe, and at local levels in Scotland. Project researchers organised or contributed to sessions dedicated to topics of soil carbon, regenerative agriculture, and sustainable land use, and on the roles of soils in achieving public policy, and hosted field tours to project research sites in south-west, north-east and northern Scotland. The organisation of the event overall included representatives from the project, Scottish Government, Scottish public agencies, businesses, and NGOs alongside researchers, providing forums to follow-up policy initiatives aired at the COP26, and research planned for Healthy Soils on management. A full account of the event, and acknowledgement of the support through 10 projects of the Strategic Research Programme 2022-27 and associated Underpinning National Capacity is accessible here.
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