Advancing European SOC Monitoring
The WORLDSOILS project participated in the ESA Living Planet Symposium 2025, held from 23 to 27 June 2025 at the Austria Center Vienna, Austria. This prestigious event brought together nearly 7,000 space professionals from 119 countries to explore the latest developments in Earth observation (EO) and its role in climate action and sustainability.
Among the many thematic sessions, Session F.04.03 on Desertification, Land Degradation and Soil Management focused on soil health and the role of EO in supporting soil indicators, as required by the EU Soil Monitoring Law, which mandates the integration of Copernicus data for SOC monitoring. The WORLDSOILS team presented the project’s latest enhancements to the European Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) monitoring system. The presentation highlighted the project’s methodology and infrastructure for estimating SOC content in the surface soil layer across Europe, leveraging EO data and harmonized modeling approaches. Key points included:
- Integration of multi-source EO data for improved SOC estimation.
- Use of spectral models for croplands and a digital soil mapping approach for forests and grasslands.
- Implementation of pixel-based uncertainty measures.
- Evaluation of predicted SOC against data from National Reporting Centres in Wallonia, North Macedonia, and the Czech Republic.
- Development of scalable, harmonized workflows for continental and regional SOC monitoring.
In 2025, the following system enhancements are underway:
- Improving EO-based models (e.g., masking bare soil and semi-arid agriculture with tree cover).
- Generating SOC products over extended areas in Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and China.
- Designing, testing, and validating an EO-based model to measure the SOC/clay ratio.
- Enhancing SOC map resolution to 50 m or better, as requested by stakeholders.
- Upgrading the processing infrastructure to meet the system’s technical requirements.
- Transferring the soil compositing processor, tools, and algorithms to ESA’s Application Propagation Environment (APEx).
- Adapting the graphical user interface (GUI) to support the new SOC/clay ratio index.
For more information about the symposium, visit the ESA LPS25 official website.