Innovative approach to monitoring soil health in England and Wales

Tender description

The recently published 25 Year Environment Plan sets out Defra’s long term approach to managing and protecting our natural environment. The Plan acknowledges that we currently lack sufficient data to understand the current status of our soils and the need to invest in soil monitoring. Traditional national soil monitoring (i.e. sample collections on a grid or stratified random basis, across the country) has provided valuable contextual information, but , for considerable resource input currently only provides national scale statistics which are not adequate to answer many of today’s policy questions. Therefore, recognising the importance of this type of soil monitoring, the purpose of this research is to identify innovative and cost-effective ways of delivering the required additional information to support policy and enhance existing monitoring programmes. The main aims of this research project are outlined below: • To identify the current and anticipated policy questions in England and Wales that require an understanding of the changing health of our soils; • To develop an innovative, cost effective, monitoring solution to improve our understanding of soil health status across England and Wales; • To develop a robust soil monitoring framework/methodology which collates and integrates multiple data sources at the appropriate scales required for answering key soil health policy questions; • To develop a flexible soil monitoring framework/methodology which can allow further data inputs to meet future policy/end user needs; • To provide evidence to inform the development of appropriate soil metrics and a new environmental land management scheme, as set out in the Future Farming Command Paper and the 25 year environment Plan. • To provide evidence to help co-ordinate and embed best practice for sustainable management of soil resources in Wales, as part of the natural resource management policy framework.