About

Project presentation

As a general goal, this project aims to provide to various European policymakers and stakeholders an integrative scientific framework for sustainable management of degradative agricultural lands, by modelling multiple land degradation (LD) processes and creating a complex and easily accessible informational support of land multi-degradation (LMD) in Europe. More precisely, this project will focus on modelling 12 degradative processes (water erosion, wind erosion, soil organic carbon loss, soil salinization, soil acidification, soil compaction, soil nutrient imbalances, soil pollution via pesticides, soil pollution via heavy metals, vegetation degradation, groundwater decline and aridity), which are highly relevant for highlighting the agricultural productivity decline in Europe and worldwide. The project includes 40 countries, 27 of which are European Union (EU) member states, and 13 non-EU states. The study area comprises the agricultural lands of almost all European countries, except for 7 (Vatican, Iceland, Belarus, Ukraine, Republic of Moldova and transcontinental states Russia and Turkey) that will be excluded from the project, due to small size (Vatican, without agricultural areas) or lack of geospatial data for most of the analysed LD processes (the other 6 countries). The 40 states hold ~2.1 million km2 of agricultural lands, over half of which (~1.1 million km2) are arable lands.

The general goal of the project will be met through 5 specific objectives (O):

  1. processing the 12 processes and modelling LMD across European agricultural environments;
  2. modelling the impact of LMD on the main agricultural crops of the continent;
  3. developing a complex statistical / geostatistical database on LMD, directly accessible to European policymakers and stakeholders;
  4. developing a complex cartographic / geospatial database on LMD, directly accessible to European policymakers and stakeholders;
  5. providing a Web Map Service platform with LMD data, for easy access to project results by European policymakers and stakeholders.

fig. 1Schematic approach with all general methodological steps that will be applied in the project By meeting O.1, a complex geospatial database with agricultural lands exposed to multiple degradative conditions in Europe will be obtained, which is crucial for meeting the next 4 objectives. Through O.2, the statistical impact of multiple convergent processes on European agricultural productions will be explored, which will be useful, among others, for validating the LMD results. By reaching O.3, detailed statistical (tabular) data on the spatial status (area in km2 / %) of individual processes / LMD will be extracted regionally, in order to create a complex, useful and easily accessible informational support for European policymakers / stakeholders. By meeting O.4, various spatial (raster) data of LD / LMD will be produced, to become useful and directly accessible to European policymakers / stakeholders. O.5 will be met by creating an online support to ensure rapid access to project data by European policymakers / stakeholders.