The PREPSOIL Preparing for the "Soil Deal for Europe Mission project facilitates the deployment of the Mission across European regions. This will be achieved through the co-creation and roll out of tools and spaces for interaction, knowledge-sharing and co-learning, as well as stocktaking and dialogue to understand how regional assessment of soil needs, supported by harmonized monitoring mechanisms, can then lead to action in living labs and lighthouses for soil health.

One of the major Soil Mission components is development of a robust, harmonized soil monitoring framework, enabling assessment of policy effects and building information on soil health status trends. In order to develop such a monitoring framework, it is necessary to integrate current knowledge on existing monitoring programs and look for harmonization and improvement of the approaches applied across Europe. One of current gaps in soil monitoring is insufficient coverage of soils located in urban, forest or industrial areas.
The overall objective of PREPSOIL task 5.1 is to contribute to consolidation of the Mission’s soil monitoring framework by assessing how to extend the current and upcoming results from other projects dedicated to agricultural soils and existing soil monitoring initiatives to natural, forest, urban and industrial soils.
The task methodology leading to collection of information on agricultural and non-agricultural soil monitoring involved two main phases: phase 1 - a review of selected (completed, ongoing, newly started) projects, supported by the European Commission, dedicated or linked to soil monitoring issues; phase 2 - an inventory of national experiences (national systems, initiatives) on soil monitoring with a special focus on non-agricultural areas. The results of these two phases constitute the basis for a broader discussion on future monitoring of non-agricultural soils. Such a discussion will be carried out in the third phase of the Task 5.1 activity.