On behalf of the Scientific and Organizing Committees, we invite you on the “Soil Health: Current Status and Future Needs” Conference

The principal goal of the “Soil Health: Current Status and Future Needs” Conference is to addresses pressing challenges related to the land, such as the need for:

1. Climate change mitigation and adaption,
2. Prevention of desertification and land degradation,
3. Ensuring food security and
4. Transitioning into more sustainable and resilient to climate change agricultural systems.

Novel knowledge on these topics is expected to contribute to the successful implementation of ongoing initiatives in farming systems and specifically land neutrality, EU farm to Fork initiative and the European Green Strategy as well as on the successfully meet the SDG .

Although the concept of soil health has emerged in recent years, it has raised great concern from researchers, policy makers, stakeholders and industry. As a result, several frameworks have been developed to date but still it has been widely recognized that a better operational use of the soil health concept is needed. Implementation of studies at divergent pedo-climatic landscapes, and analysis and interpretation of the effects of practices associated with soil health on ecosystem services will provide us mechanistic insights on the drivers regulating soil heath and will allow us to scale up (regionally) or down (local fields) providing critical knowledge for policy makers. Such knowledge could be also used to inform existing tools to extrapolate the effect of soil health practices at longer timescales and develop decision supporting systems.

The conference aims to gather scientists, policy makers and stakeholders to exchange knowledge on soils management in a changing world with a focus on the latest developments in the field of soil health. The selection and adoption of agroecosystem management practices based on the principles of soil health will accelerate the transition of conventional agricultural systems into more sustainable ones contributing to the mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

The “Soil Health: Current Status and Future Needs” Conference will be held in the beautiful city of Chania, Crete, Greece. Conference attendees will enjoy accessibility to world-class conference facilities and beautiful tours in city.

Conference topics

• Soil health: Knowledge Gaps and future challenges
• Soil monitoring and mapping
• Restoration of degraded soils
• Sustainable management of soils in a changing world
• Microbiota and soil health
• Biogeochemical cycles of nutrients
• Modelling soil processes and ecosystem services
• Soil carbon pricing and trading
• Science and Policy integration for Soil Heath