In July 2024, the WORLD-SOILS project reached a successful conclusion with the presentation of validation results at the final meeting. This milestone also marked the launch of the project’s public-facing products, now accessible through an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) available at https://gui.world-soils.com/, offering valuable tools and insights for soil analysis to the global community.

As the project wraps up, a series of recommendations have been identified to potentially extend the project’s activities and continue building on its achievements. These recommendations aim to further enhance the impact and utility of WORLD-SOILS, ensuring sustained contributions to the field of soil science and its applications worldwide:

• To continue modelling the soil organic matter -SOC- parameter at regional scale to upscale it later to a continental scale. 
• To exploit new indexes and soil indicators: simple/complex soil Properties:  a soil moisture index (SMI), a soil water index (SWI), a drought index, the mean annual basal area increment (BAI), soil sealing index
• To estimate the SOC/clay ratio, supported by Earth Observation (EO)
• To expand the test sites in Europe as well as selected sites in other continents, depending on data quality, availability and institutional cooperation agreements reached. 
• To establish institutional relationships and agreements for data access and service production (e.g.: FAO, EEA, EUSO, NASA, JAXA). This includes joint work with Certification entities. 
• To plan end user training activities on how to exploit EO based SOC products.

The results of the project were also presented at the “Earth Observation for Soil Protection and Restoration Symposium” https://www.eo4soilprotection.org  organized by ESA in summer 2024. The developed tools and algorithms have been recognized as highly valuable for the end-user community; however, the development of high-resolution SOC maps and their validation is focused on regional scale in Europe, and the improvement on the global scale is considered essential.

As a result, ESA decided to extend the WORLD-SOILS project activities issuing a CHANGE REQUEST to the Contract. This request consist in:

• Improving the existing models and SOC products.
• Producing and procuring the EO based soil products over extended areas.
• Validating the new products developed over EU regional sites, extended areas in other continents and across the EU continental area
• Long -term support of the current service
• Converging system components with APEx (ESA Application Propagation Environments)

The expected duration of the extended activities is 14 months, and the activities will commence in March 2025.