AI4SoilHealth project: accelerating collection and use of soil health information using AI technology to support the Soil Deal for Europe and EU Soil Observatory

The objective of AI4SoilHealth is to co-design, create and maintain an open access European-wide digital infrastructure, compiled using state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods combined with new and deep soil health understanding and measures. The AI-based data infrastructure would function as a Digital Twin to the real-World biophysical system, a Soil Digital Twin, that could be then used for assessing and continuously monitoring Soil Health metrics by land use and/or management parcel, supporting the European Commission’s objective of transitioning towards healthy soils by 2030. The project is divided into seven (7) work-packages including: (WP2) Policy and stakeholder engagement - networking and synchronising with EU and national programmes, (WP3) Soil health methodology and standards - developing/testing methodology to be used by WPs 4-6, (WP4) Soil health in-situ monitoring tools and data - developing field and laboratory solutions for Observations & Measurements, (WP5) Harmonised EU-wide soil monitoring services - developing the final suite of tools, data and services, (WP6) Multi-actor engagement pilots - organizing field-works and collect users' feedback, (WP7) Soil literacy, capacity building and communication - organizing public campaigns and producing educational materials. Key deliverables of the project include: 1) Coherent Soil Health Index methodology, 2) Rapid Soil Health Assessment Toolbox, 3) AI4SoilHealth Data Cube for Europe, 4) Soil-Health-Soil-Degradation-Monitor, and 5) AI4SoilHealth API and Mobile phone App. Produced tools will be exposed to target-users (including farmer associations in >10 countries), so their feedback is used to improve design/functionality. Produced high-resolution pan-European datasets will be distributed under an Open Data licence, allowing easy access by development communities.