The key aim of the LANDMARK project was to develop a framework for soil management to support sustainable European food production, addressing challenges at local, regional and EU scale.
The work delivered under the project has been divided into three pillars:
1) Pillar 1 focused on the local scale and the development of the Soil Navigator decision support system (DSS) to support farmers and advisors in sustainable management of their land and soil in the long term by i) assessing the initial supply of the five main soil functions based on data entered by the user, ii) providing a number of management recommendations to improve specific soil functions based on the demand and importance entered by the user and iii) evaluating the resulting supply of soil functions based on user preferences for the suggested management recommendations.
2) Pillar 2 developed and tested monitoring options to evaluate the supply of soil functions across the climatic regions of Europe. It also assessed and further optimised the LUCAS-Soil survey to facilitate the monitoring of soil functions rather than soil properties per se.
3) Pillar 3 focused on delivering a set of 11 policy options addressing EU-perspectives on agricultural land management. For each soil function, the key governance challenges, together with the main market and policy drivers have been outlined, leading to the development of unique, spatially explicit indicators.