Having launched Working Groups on Living Lab Foundations & Governance and Stakeholder Engagement in Living Labs, SOILL completes its Working Group series with a community dedicated to Soil Biodiversity.
The Working Group brings together core participants from Mission Soil Living Labs alongside European and Emerging Living Labs and other key external stakeholders. Like its predecessors, it operates through the SOILL Hub.
About the Working Group
The Soil Biodiversity Working Group is a community of stakeholders with an interest in soil biodiversity and soil health. Its vision is to establish a peer support network and knowledge exchange platform for practitioners within Mission Soil and wider European Living Labs.
Its objective is to support a harmonised assessment framework across Living Labs, with consistent indicators, sampling, and monitoring approaches that enable cross-sector, cross-Living Lab, and cross-country comparisons and analysis. This will be achieved by providing a knowledge exchange platform and training opportunities for existing and emerging Living Labs to learn from "what works well". The Working Group will also support harmonisation consistent with the requirements of the European Soil Monitoring Law, guided by emerging research.
Key Objectives & Priority Areas
The Working Group's central priority is harmonisation across Living Labs, addressing a set of shared and pressing challenges:
- the lack of common metrics for assessment;
- the cost and time required for many soil biodiversity measures;
- the expertise required to interpret certain types of data, such as eDNA data;
- the difficulty of establishing a coherent monitoring framework that works across different soil environments, from agricultural fields to urban settings.
To address these challenges, the Working Group focuses on identifying best practices, harmonising metrics, monitoring approaches, and data-sharing practices, ensuring alignment with the European Soil Monitoring Law, and providing training through webinars and case studies. By building synergy across Living Labs, the Working Group aims to enable data to be combined and compared over time, strengthening the collective evidence base for soil biodiversity across Europe.
Get Involved
Soil biodiversity underpins productive and resilient ecosystems, yet it continues to face pressures from pollution, intensive land use, and climate change. Despite its importance, it is often overlooked in planning and management decisions. Participating in this Working Group offers the chance to change that narrative.
Mission Soil Living Labs provide a unique setting where farmers, land-based industries, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers come together to test and refine biodiversity-friendly solutions. By joining, members will contribute to harmonising monitoring approaches, sharing best practices, and strengthening knowledge networks. They will play an active role in linking research, practice, and policy and in ensuring that soil biodiversity is recognised as a cornerstone of climate adaptation and ecosystem resilience.