Soil management and cropping systems enhancing soil structure are key to support the sustainable
adaptation of EU agriculture to climate change. The occurrence of extreme weather
events, such as drought in summer and floods in winter, will increase almost everywhere in the EU.
Guidance on management practices and co-learning opportunities to help farmers adapt to these
situations are necessary. Many practices exist and have already been subject to scientific research
for several decades. Nevertheless, it is not always clear which practices have really proven effective
in which contexts, what trade-offs have to be taken into account and which synergies might
occur.
ClimaSoMa investigated the implications of agricultural management practices for soil hydrological
functioning under European agro-environmental conditions. We synthesized the
results of 36 selected meta-analyses (representing data from 2803 unique studies) studying the impact
of soil and crop management practices on soil hydrological functioning. As such, we identified
the effectiveness of the selected practices, and also remaining knowledge gaps. Important tradeoffs
and synergies related to crop production, water quality, and greenhouse gas emissions were
also assessed based on the results of additional published meta-analyses. The results of this second
order meta-analysis are described in Chapter 2, Soil and crop management for climate-smart
soils.
In parallel, we identified and summarized the socio-economic & political barriers experienced
by farmers and incentives for the application of soil and crop management in climate adaptation
strategies. We present the results of a stock-take of EU policies and their instruments
impacting agricultural management in Chapter 3, EU policy instruments driving soil management
in view of climate adaptation . Barriers & drivers at the farm level in relation to improving soil health
and climate change adaptation are discussed in Chapter 4, Farmer engagement as key to successful
climate adaptation . The work includes perceptions of barriers and drivers that co-determine the
willingness of farmers to act and adapt to climate change.
Human-induced climate change is expected to continue altering climate drivers (e.g., air temperature
and precipitation) and enhancing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, also in the near-future.
Changes in these conditions will alter soil processes and affect soil physical (e.g., water availability),
chemical (e.g., SOM) and biological (e.g., microbial community and enzyme activity) functioning. It
is therefore not only important to understand how our own actions and practices affect soil functioning,
but also what is the direct impact of the changing climate. Chapter 5, Untangling the effect of
climatic drivers with space-for-time or manipulation experiments provides a perspective on how
individual and combined effects of climate drivers (decreased and/or increased temperature
and precipitation) and enhanced CO2 concentration affect soil functioning as well as the responses
of soil to such changes. This chapter also discusses the limitations of different types of
experimental approaches or research methodologies on the topic.
Saturated and near-saturated soil hydraulic conductivities Kh (mm.h-1) determine the partitioning
of precipitation into surface runoff and infiltration. They are fundamental to soils’ susceptibility to
preferential flow and indicate soil aeration properties. So-called pedotransfer functions are needed
to estimate Kh from predictor variables, but they have been largely unsuccessful. We therefore analyzed
bigger database, aiming at finding better predictors. In Chapter 6 Quantitative meta-analysis,
publication bias and machine-learning to derive context-specific relationships, we collated OTIMDB
(Open Tension-disk Infiltrometer Meta-database), which builds on a meta-database published
by Jarvis, N., Koestel, J., Messing, I., Moeys, J., and Lindahl, A.: Influence of soil, land use and
climatic factors on the hydraulic conductivity of soil, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 17, 5185–5195, 2013.
The ability to extract, organize and synthesize knowledge from a huge body of literature is crucial
to take into account context-specific relationships and variability in space and time. As a first step,
structured information from scientific publications needs to be extracted to build a meta-database,
which then can be analyzed and recommendations can be given in dependence to the pedoclimatic
context. Manually building such a database by going through all publications is very timeconsuming.
In Chapter 7, Natural language processing as a tool to explore the information in vast
bodies of literature we explore the potential of natural language processing (NLP) to extract metadata
from agronomic studies.