HoliSoils project ready to reach out with results just at the right time!
It was a bittersweet yet timely moment when the HoliSoils consortium gathered in person for the last time for their final annual meeting. That same week, the European Council reached a provisional deal with the European Parliament and voting on the EU Soil Monitoring Law passed to the next stage. The path towards the new law seemed clearer, just as partners in the project are clarifying their own results which will surely help to support forest management for healthy forest soils in the years to come.
The project, about to enter its fifth year, began in the confines of each partner’s computers, as it launched successfully in May 2021, during Covid lockdown. With movement restrictions far behind them, more than 50 participants, representing the project’s 20 partner organisations and its Stakeholder and End-user Advisory Board (SEAB), travelled to the south of France for the project’s final annual meeting, hosted by Aix Marseille University on 8 – 10 April.
The focus of the meeting was on the significant number of results that will be shared in the final six months of the project, and the project’s legacy on how to optimise forest management practices and policy to ensure soil health under climate change and disturbance conditions. Work package leaders gave presentations focusing on the impact of their work, and researchers and experts shared exciting new findings in thematic sessions organised around four keynote presentations:
- Effects of biodiversity on decomposition
- Effects of management and disturbances on soil organisms
- Forest fires and mitigation of the soil C loss
- Experimentation, modelling and scenarios of forest management
An interactive workshop engaged project colleagues, coordinators and SEAB members in the co-creation of key messaging for a Synthesis Report of project results, currently under development. These include a large number of practical guidance documents, reference maps and databases, policy briefs, and simulation models and tools. Results will be available in the autumn in formats tailored to the project’s different stakeholder groups.
Also under development is a HoliSoils map portal, and researchers are currently working on the results of a survey of forest owners and managers in 13 countries, undertaken in collaboration with the ForestPaths and FORWARDS projects. Amongst other insights, the survey aims to elicit motivations and behaviours regarding the adoption of Climate and Biodiversity Smart Forestry practices.
Finally, during the plenary sessions, post-docs and other researchers were active as ever, with a lively presentation of posters on selected results and experiments from around Europe.
The final day of the meeting was a celebration of everything that this project is about. A field trip into the beautiful Provençal forest allowed consortium partners to discuss their work in more depth and dive into experiments held in the Quercus pubescens forest, at the HoliSoils WP5 study site Saint Christol d’Albion focusing on the impact of forest management and the O3HP study site dedicated to the impact of climate change. And as a special treat, partners also visited the world famous Haute Provence Observatory, known for its exoplanet discoveries.
HoliSoils is also aiming for the stars in its final months, with partners determined to consolidate findings, publish papers, finalise tools, and share the results of this ground-breaking project with people who will be able to use them to improve the health of forest soils around Europe, and beyond.
