Functional Land Management

Lead partners :

Participants :

WUR2, TEAGASC, UCPH, JRC, INRA, SLU

Description of work

Objectives:

The team is applying the concept of Functional Land Management (Schulte et al., 2014) at EU level. This means assessing the demand and the supply for each of the soil functions, at European scale and assessing potential land use options, using advanced spatially explicit modelling. Outputs include indicative scenario maps of the actual and potential supply of soil functions across the EU.

  1. Quantify the demands for the five aggregate soil functions in an EU context (based on WP1 results) (Task 4.1)
  2. Assess the capacity of soils to deliver five soil functions in an EU context, using the proxy-indicators developed in WP3 and EU datasets collated in WP 2 (Task 4.2)
  3. Conduct scenario analyses with a view to arriving at optimum suites of soil functions at EU level, as determined by all stakeholders in WP1 (Task 4.3)

Deliverables:

  • Demand scenarios: quantification of the demand for soil functions, using the prioritisation /weighting by contrasting stakeholder groups (Deliverable 4.1)
  •  Soil function supply maps (Deliverable 4.2)
  • Scenarios maps: visualising optimised scenarios where supply of soil functions matches demands for these functions – at regional and EU scales (Deliverable 4.3 )

How?

WP4  team developed a tool for functional land management that allows a dynamic assessment of the supply of soil functions in response to particular changes in land-use and management across Europe.  This is possible applying Bayesian Belief modelling to develop demand and supply maps for Europe.

Next

The work is the base of the EU policy tools for optimising soil functions (WP5)