Empowering Global Change by Advancing Soil Health with Cutting-Edge Research and Collaborative Efforts
SOILPROM tackles soil contamination across Europe by using insights from advanced modelling and collaborative research. We focus on reducing harmful contaminants and promoting sustainable soil management to improve ecosystem health.
According to the European Commission, around 60-70% of soils in the EU are in an poor condition, with soil contamination being one of the main causes. The impact of soil degradation by environmental pollution on soil processes, soil functions and ecosystem services, however, remains unclear.
To enhance this understanding, process transport models are used to simulate the transport and fate of soil pollutants in different soil types and climatic and ecological conditions. However, these models are compartmentalised according to the type of processes and/or environmental compartments being addressed, nor are they clearly linked to soil functions.
The overall objective of SOILPROM is to provide improved and integrated models for transport of pollutants and pollutant fate across soil, air, water, and plants. In this way, the impact of soil contamination on soil functions and related ecosystem services can be assessed more properly. In addition, it will give support to local stakeholders in developing sustainable land management strategies and policies for healthy soils across Europe. The focus lies on a selection of contaminants deemed to pose a high risk to the environment and humans, namely metals, microplastics, pesticides, and PFAS.
VITO's role
VITO's role: VITO focuses on PFAS contamination and will develop a model framework that allows to simulate PFAS pollution from its source (e.g. factory) to the soil, after deposition from the air, and into surface and groundwater followed by plant uptake. For this VITO is working closely with three teams on this project: the Digital Water Services team is coordinating the project on behalf on VITO and is specialised in leaching modelling with Geopearl and Hydrus. The AQMS team has considerable experience in measuring PFAS concentration in air and detecting PFAS in deposition, both wet and dry deposition, of different size fractions. Lastly, the ATMOSYS team will deploy its atmospheric dispersion model IFDM and update it to include PFAS deposition. In a nutshell, VITO will contribute to the following:
- VITO leads a use case on PFAS contamination near a former industrial site from multiple sources.
- Based on measurements of the use case, the coupled atmospheric dispersion – soil leaching – plant uptake model will be validated and parameterised.
- We will contribute to applying our model framework to evaluate land management scenarios.
- We are responsible for inventorying databases and collecting data across use cases to be implemented in Destination Earth and OESE.
Year: 2024 – 2027
Project partners: Wageningen University - coordination, Euroquality SAS, NIBIO, Forschungszentrum Jülichn, Geoponiko Panepistimion Athinon, Helmholtz-Zentrum Für Umweltforschung, Masarykova Univerzita, Politechnika Gdanska, Savonia-Ammattikorkeakoulu, Stichting Wageningen Research, Universidad Politecnica de Cartagena
Website: SOILPROM
