Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the October newsletter of the EGU Soil System Sciences Division! This month, we invite you to follow the progresses of the Soil Monitoring Law, go back to the Global Symposium on Soil Sealing and Urban Soils and to the Part III of the 5th EUSO Stakeholders Forum Part, read a new SOIL paper, and learn more about the SSS division through our new SSS Blog post and the Linkedin and Bluesky pages. Moreover, we also have some reminders for  the BENCHMARKS call for experts, the upcoming European Carbon Farming Summit, and for the EGU26 General Assembly call for abstracts.

Heike Knicker, Division President
Beatrice Giannetta & Sana Boubehziz, ECS Reps
The ECS Team

What recently happened on Soil System Sciences?

The EU Parliament adopted the provisional agreement on the Commission’s Soil Monitoring Law, aiming for healthy EU soils by 2050 and a coherent, harmonised monitoring framework.

Read More Here

On 6-7 October held online and in Pisa (Italy) the FAO-IUSS hybrid event Global Symposium on Soil Sealing and Urban Soils. The symposium gathered experts, policymakers and practitioners in order to identify and promote integrated strategies for sustainable urban soil management; examine practices and policy frameworks for soil unsealing and restoration; and foster cross-sectoral collaboration for scaling urban soil solutions. Recordings of the two sessions led by the FAO are available online.

Learn More Here

On 9 October in Rome (Italy) and online, the third part of the hybrid event EUSO Stakeholder Forum 2025 entitled "Soil challenges and solutions in the Mediterranean" focused on challenges and solutions for soils in the Mediterranean area. Attendees had the opportunity to reflect on recent research to better quantify soil degradation and innovative solutions focusing on sustainability, resilience, and adapting to climate and landscape challenges.

More Details here

Discover the article: “Representing soil landscapes from digital soil mapping products – helping the map to speak for itself”. By David G. Rossiter and Laura Poggio. Here is a short summary: Soil maps are useful for many applications. The main used method DSM, uses training observations and machine-learning to predict per-pixel. Accuracy is statistically at known points, but soils occur in spatial patterns.

Read The Full Article

In addition, you can now read interesting updates of the Soil System Sciences Division and related topics on LinkedIn and Bluesky pages.

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Upcoming Events and Deadlines

Experts are invited by BENCHMARKS (a Mission Soil-funded project) to contribute to evaluate soil function models to shape a harmonized, context-specific soil indicator framework. Based on soil functions resulting from bundles of soil processes co-occurring in space and time, these models can be defined by direct measure of process rates or by proxy indicators use. Experts are encouraged to contribute by completing a short questionnaire by 30 October 2025.

Contribute here

The 3rd European Carbon Farming Summit will take place on 17-19 March 2026 in Padua (Italy). Being Europe's leading event dedicated to advancing regenerative agriculture and low-carbon farming solutions, this submit edition is dedicated to collectively shaping the future of regenerative agriculture in Europe.

See event information

The call for abstracts to the EGU26 General Assembly is now open, and will last until 15 January 2026 at 13:00 CET. The General Assembly 2026 will take place both on-site in Vienna (Austria) and virtually on 3-8 May 2026. Bringing together worldwide geoscientists and covering all disciplines in the Earth, planetary and space sciences, the meeting will be a welcoming and interactive forum where scientists will present and discuss their work with experts.

Submit here