In a world grappling with complex global challenges such as population growth, climate change, and environmental degradation, ensuring security, sustainability, and food safety is paramount. Agricultural practices and food production processes are integral to public health, economic stability, and societal well-being. However, conventional approaches have often operated in isolation, limiting our understanding and hindering scalability. The WHEATWATCHER initiative seeks to break these barriers by uniting soil health monitoring, plant health assessment, and food traceability through a cutting-edge digital soil monitoring system. This system assesses soil nutrition, chemical, and biological factors impacting wheat grains from field growth to flour production, spanning multiple European regions. By actively involving stakeholders, including farmers, mill proprietors, and policymakers, WHEATWATCHER tailors its solution to practical needs. It leverages diverse sensor technologies, advanced machine learning models, and automated mapping techniques to boost efficiency and scalability. A Decision Support System and cloud platform ensure accessible insights. At its core, a machine learning model seamlessly integrates technologies, creating a cohesive solution that bridges the gaps between soil health, plant health, and food traceability. WHEATWATCHER aims to foster harmony between sensing technologies, data processing, and stakeholder engagement, revolutionizing comprehensive monitoring.

Microbes in soil drive ecosystem services defining life on the Earth. Translocation of these microbes is key features in the spatial exploration of soil. This directly impacts major ecological processes such as niche colonization and the development of soil structure, but knowledge of how microbes migrate in soil is scarce. A potential universal mechanism is fungal hyphae mediated transport (FHMT) where bacteria use hyphae of fungi as a route to translocate in a directed manner. However, this has been solely observed in the laboratory, but not in soil where single-cell level studies are restricted by technical limits. MICOL-FUNTRANS overcomes these limitations by developing and exploiting a novel system combining microfluidics, microbiological and microscopical methods to i) observe microbial movement in soil-like systems and ii) identify single involved organisms. Micro-channels will provide treatments to compare soil colonization and structure formation with and without FHMT. Ultimately, findings will be upscaled to an ecological level in a dedicated field study using a glacier forefield in the Arctic, which constitutes a unique natural laboratory to study initial soil development as ongoing climate change melts glaciers and frees vast areas of barren soil at present. The results of this project will foster an integrated view on the soil biome and push research on bacterial-fungal interactions to the centre of attention in soil microbiology and related industries. Specifically, knowledge of migration rates of microbes in soil will impact models on nutrient distribution and efforts in bioremediation of contaminated soil. A better understanding of the initial stages of soil structure formation at the micro-scale will impact efforts in soil quality and health preservation related actions, a topic of highest societal and economic interest as the degradation of soil is one of the most pressing environmental threads we are currently facing.

The seismic wavefield carries the imprint of material it crossed. We now understand that seismic wavefields alter the material when they pass through it and that these changes are measurable. This is important, because the dynamic response of Earth’s material directly affects our societies: geomaterial alterations are associated with many natural hazards, such as volcanic eruptions, landslides, earthquakes, and the structural health of civil structures such as bridges and buildings. Traditional seismic sensors - global and regional networks of seismometers - provide us with high temporal resolution, but sparse spatial resolution. Right now, new sensing technologies (fiber-optic cables (DAS), large-N arrays, rotation sensors) are emerging that can give us much more detailed spatial information about how the seismic wavefield behaves. This means that we can study changes in local material properties, and investigate complex behavior of materials as they deform under small strain. These sensing technologies are reaching a level of maturity where they can be incorporated into common seismological observation practice. For this new era of seismological instrumentation and observation fundamentally new skills need to be developed. In SPIN, we will train the next generation of scientists to develop novel views about the dynamic behaviour of Earth materials, and in particular how to observe them with the revolutionary new sensing systems at hand. It is currently enigmatic how to combine these sensor types to optimize resolution power. This research and training will impact the way we understand solid Earth processes, how we interrogate the Earth’s geomechanical behavior, and the way we forecast natural hazards.

The objective of SHEER is to develop best practices for assessing and mitigating the environmental footprint of shale gas exploration and exploitation. The consortium includes partners from Italy, United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, USA. It will develop a probabilistic procedure for assessing short and long-term risks associated with groundwater contamination, air pollution and induced seismicity. The severity of each of these depends strongly on the unexpected enhanced permeability pattern, which may develop as an unwanted by-product of the fracking processes and may become pathway for gas and fluid migration towards underground water reservoirs or the surface. An important part of SHEER will be devoted to monitor and understand how far this enhanced permeability pattern will develop both in space and time. These hazard may be at least partially inter-related as they all depend on this enhanced permeability pattern. Therefore they will be approached from a multi-hazard, multi parameter perspective. SHEER will develop methodologies and procedures to track and model fracture evolution around shale gas exploitation sites and a robust statistically based, multi-parameter methodology to assess environmental impacts and risks across the operational lifecycle of shale gas. The developed methodologies will be applied and tested on a comprehensive database consisting of seismicity, changes of the quality of ground-waters and air, ground deformations, and operational data collected from past case studies. They will be improved by the high quality data SHEER will collect monitoring micro-seismicity, air and groundwater quality and ground deformation in a planned hydraulic fracturing to be carried out by the Polish Oil and Gas Company in Pomerania. Best practices to be applied in Europe to monitor and minimize any environmental impacts will be worked out with the involvement of an advisory group including governmental decisional bodies and private industries.

EOSC-Pillar gathers representatives of the fast-growing national initiatives for coordinating data infrastructures and services in Italy, France, Germany, Austria and Belgium to establish an agile and efficient federation model for open science services covering the full spectrum of European research communities. Our proposal aims to implement some of the main pieces of the EOSC jigsaw within a science-driven approach which is efficient, scalable and sustainable and that can be rolled out in other countries. National initiatives are the key of our strategy, for their capacity to attract and coordinate many elements of the complex EOSC ecosystem and for their sustainability, which will add resilience to the whole structure. We will combine these initiatives, who represent research communities in each country, with use cases of transnational networks working to implement FAIR data practices. Through the coordination of national initiatives, EOSC-Pillar will be able to support the gradual alignment of policy and practice among countries and compliance to EOSC standards. We are convinced that by federating national initiatives through common policies, FAIR services, shared standards, and technical choices, EOSC-Pillar will be a catalyst for science-driven transnational open data and open science services offered through the EOSC portal. These initiatives will emanate the promotion of FAIR data practices and services across scientific communities, sharing best practice, and igniting opportunities for interdisciplinary approaches in the EOSC. Above all, our vision is that national initiatives are key to involve user communities and research infrastructures both as test-beds for solutions, but also in their very design and sustainable evolution. For this reason, EOSC-Pillar’s workplan is built around selected user-driven pilots from 7 scientific domains, that will show EOSC in action and provide valuable input to guide the roll out of services for other communities.