Since the official launch of the SoilWise Data and Knowledge Catalogue (SWC) in February 2025, SoilWise project has been working on refining its functionalities and engaging with various stakeholders to validate newly developed functionalities and to provide feedback and valuable insights. The project has been focusing on enhancing metadata validation, expanding the knowledge graph with vocabularies, ontologies, and soil health resources, developing the experimental chatbot, and working on a new design for the user interface to improve usability. System usage and monitoring were also strengthened, with tools such as Hotjar used to track repository access and support platform improvements.
In addition to platform development, SoilWise Project has actively participated in various conferences, workshops, and stakeholder meetings, presenting the repository, sharing updates on the project’s progress, and gathering feedback from different user groups.
Additionally, SoilWise Project co-leads the Mission Soil Cluster on Data and Knowledge Management, collaborating with the JRC and Horizon Europe projects to align terminology, standards, and governance. These engagements provided opportunities to gather feedback from different user groups and showcase the tools and resources developed so far.
The EU’s new Soil Monitoring Directive marks a historic step toward achieving healthy soils across Europe by 2050, placing soil on equal footing with air and water and emphasizing the need for reliable, harmonized, and FAIR soil data. By introducing common methods, reference analyses, and validated transfer functions, the Directive ensures that soil data collected across Member States are comparable and robust, forming a solid foundation for evidence-based policies, research, and sustainable land management.
SoilWise project complements the EU monitoring framework by connecting and harmonizing research-based soil data. By bridging scientific datasets with governmental monitoring systems, SoilWise ensures that valuable research insights feed directly into EU-wide soil health assessments. In doing so, it strengthens the link between soil science and policy, helping Europe move closer to the vision of healthy soils for 2050.
SoilWise project consortium met on 7–9 October 2025 in Wageningen, hosted by ISRIC – World Soil Information. Over three days, partners reviewed progress, engaged in interactive sessions across the project’s four phases, and participated in live testing of key components such as metadata templates, knowledge graphs, harvesting workflows, and search functionalities. Program also included User Cases demo preparations, a field tour around Wageningen, and a visit to the World Soil Museum. The final day focused on project management, communication and exploitation, and capacity-building activities, including Mission Soil Week planning. The meeting successfully strengthened collaboration and aligned next steps for advancing SoilWise’s tools and knowledge services, reinforcing the consortium’s shared commitment to impactful soil innovation across Europe.
Following the successful launch of the SoilWise Data and Knowledge Catalogue prototype, additional demonstration events were held during the previous period, engaging key stakeholders across UC3: Policy Makers and UC4: Living Labs. The UC4 session was conducted jointly with SOILL as part of their Soil Health Monitoring Training. These events provided hands-on experience in using the catalogue repository to monitor soil health, promote sustainable management, and enhance agricultural productivity.
Missed the live demos? Recordings are available on our website:
SoilWise project team participated in the Mission Soil Cluster on Data & Knowledge Management on December 2nd, 2025 in Brussels. The event brought Mission Soil projects together to exchange insights and practical approaches for strengthening soil data and knowledge management across Europe.
SoilWise led workshops in breakout rooms on key themes including soil knowledge management, vocabularies and glossaries, metadata templates, and FAIR strategies and guidance. These interactive sessions allowed participants to explore the topics in depth and put concepts into practice. SoilWise also contributed to the opening session and stayed actively engaged throughout the event as we continued working with Mission Soil partners to advance FAIR soil data for Europe.
SoilWise Project team was proud to participate in the European Mission Soil Week, held on 5–6 November 2025 in Aarhus, Denmark. The event brought together members of the Mission Soil community to exchange knowledge, discuss solutions, and highlight ongoing efforts to support healthier soils across Europe.
During the first day of this event, the SoilWise team joined the Mission Soil Project Trail, where we presented how SoilWise is making scattered soil data FAIR—Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Through short presentations and discussions with visiting groups, we showed how our work was enabling researchers, policymakers, land managers, and other stakeholders to discover, access, and use soil data more effectively.
SoilWise Project made its mark at the VII EUROSOIL, held from September 8–12 in Sevilla, Spain. The project showcased its achievements and next steps for integration with the European Soil Observatory, featuring in the EUSO Stakeholder Forum session, highlighted in keynote lectures, and contributing to the final panel discussion.
In addition, another session presented the interactive Long-Term Field Experiments data platform by ZALF partners, highlighting its connection with the SoilWise project and the value of integrated soil data. These collaborative Mission Soil initiatives are shaping the soil health discussion across Europe, with SoilWise supporting resilient soils and sustainable landscapes.
At the UNESCO Soil Initiative – Rooted to Resilience II (August 26–27) in Antwerp, Belgium, SoilWise team took part in a panel discussion highlighting how its global datasets contribute to soil monitoring across UNESCO-designated sites. The discussion highlighted the challenges of downscaling and upscaling soil data across local, national, and international levels. SoilWise showcased how it can serve as a blueprint for global soil information sharing, strengthening the UNESCO Soil Sentinels program and enabling better decision-making for soil health, sustainable land management, and climate resilience.
At AquaConSoil Conference, held on 16-20 June 2025 in Liege, Belgium, the SoilWise project presented in a session on the Mission Soil projects alongside ISLANDR, SOILPROM, PHSHES, and ARAGORN. The discussion emphasized the importance of aligning data-sharing practices across sister projects to maximize impact on soil pollution and contamination monitoring, while addressing challenges related to private data and GDPR compliance within the community.
SoilWise project was presented at 17th Soil Study Days in Geneva (Switzerland), held on July 7-11 2025 , where it drew strong interest and positive engagement from participants. The event offered an excellent opportunity to highlight the project’s mission to enhance access to data and knowledge on European soils through the development of a dedicated digital infrastructure.
Partners from Wageningen University participated in ESWC 2025, held on 1–5 June in Portoroz, Slovenia, where they presented their long-standing research on question answering using knowledge graphs, as well as their spin-out ONLIM – Knowledge-Driven Conversational AI. Their expertise now extends to the SoilWise Project, integrating GenAI and LLMs to improve access to European soil data.
Coming up: SoilWise Capacity and Community Webinars, training sessions specifically tailored to your needs, and demonstration events that will be organized following the Cycle 2 Integration and Validation Phase.
SoilWise co-leads together with JRC
Need more information on the SoilWise events, where can you find us? What is new in our community?
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