If you produce soil data or knowledge in a Mission Soil project, will anyone find it after your website goes offline? The SoilWise Project, a Horizon Europe Mission Soil project (2023–2027), builds an open-access catalogue that harvests soil metadata from across Europe and makes it discoverable through a search interface (the SoilWise Finder) and an AI chatbot (the Soil Companion), which will later be part of the European Soil Observatory (EUSO). But what surfaces in SoilWise, and how well, is decided by the publishing choices data providers make. This hands-on session shows providers exactly what, how, and why to publish so their outputs are found and reused.
We use the journey of a single metadata record as our teaching device. Following a real soil dataset as our worked example, we walk through what happens at each stage of the SoilWise pipeline (harvesting, harmonisation, validation, augmentation, storage, and discovery) and, at every stage, show the concrete publishing decision that makes it succeed: a DOI and grant-agreement number so the harvester picks the record up via OpenAIRE; a community standard so it harmonises cleanly; complete core fields so it passes validation; and recognised-vocabulary keywords and geographic extent so augmentation and search work in the provider’s favour.
Participants then get hands-on with the SoilWise publishing tools: the Tabular Soil Data Annotation tool, the SoilWise GeoPackage , and the DOI Resolution Widget.
The session is aimed at data providers: Mission Soil project data managers and coordinators, data stewards, researchers, and Living Lab participants. Attendees leave with a clear publishing checklist and a working understanding of how following the SoilWise guidelines makes their soil data findable in the catalogue and, ultimately, in the European Soil Observatory at the JRC, the platform’s foreseen long-term home. Bring a laptop.

SoilWise is a Horizon Europe Mission Soil project (2023–2027) building an open-access catalogue that brings together soil-related datasets, publications, software, and knowledge currently scattered across hundreds of European repositories, project websites, and aggregators. Rather than hosting data itself, SoilWise indexes metadata about resources held elsewhere and links back to the original sources, providing a single discovery layer that respects the autonomy of existing data providers.
This talk presents the platform by following the journey of a single soil metadata record from publication to use. Tracing one record through the system, we show how it is harvested from major European aggregators such as OpenAIRE and CORDIS; harmonised from its original format into a single common model; validated for completeness and INSPIRE compliance; augmented with standardised vocabulary concepts, multilingual labels, and link checks; and stored across a relational database, a knowledge graph, and a search index. The journey ends at the two user-facing tools: the SoilWise Finder, a search-and-browse catalogue, and the Soil Companion, a soil-domain chatbot that grounds its natural-language answers in catalogue records and links back to its sources.
This single narrative gives the audience a clear mental model of how heterogeneous, fragmented soil metadata is made coherently searchable across Europe — and where the FAIR principles work well in practice and where systemic gaps remain. The talk also looks ahead: the SoilWise Catalogue is designed to feed directly into the European Soil Observatory (EUSO) at the Joint Research Centre, which is foreseen to host and operate the platform beyond the project's lifetime, keeping the discovery layer growing as part of the European soil-observation ecosystem.
The talk is aimed at a broad audience, researchers, policy makers, Mission Soil participants, and JRC/EUSO stakeholders, interested in how European soil knowledge can be brought together and kept findable.

The SoilWise Project, a Horizon Europe Mission Soil project (2023–2027), builds an open-access catalogue that harvests soil metadata from across Europe and makes it discoverable through a search interface (the SoilWise Finder) and an AI chatbot (the Soil Companion), which will later be part of the European Soil Observatory (EUSO). Yet what surfaces in SoilWise, and how well, depends on the publishing choices data and knowledge providers make. We illustrate how metadata records go through the SoilWise pipeline, so that data and knowledge providers understand how they can make their work FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).
Starting from publication on Zenodo with a DOI and a grant-agreement number, the record is picked up automatically by the SoilWise Harvester via OpenAIRE. It is then harmonised from its source format into a common SoilWise data model and deduplicated against records from other aggregators such as the INSPIRE Geoportal and data.europa.eu. A validation step scores the record for completeness and INSPIRE compliance, while an augmentation step enriches it with standardised SoilVoc concept identifiers, normalised resource types, and geographic information extracted from text where explicit spatial metadata is missing. The processed metadata record is stored across three parallel structures, each supporting a different mode of access: a relational database, a semantic Knowledge Graph, and a full-text search index. Finally, the record becomes discoverable both through the SoilWise Finder's faceted search interface and through the Soil Companion, an AI assistant that uses retrieval-augmented generation to synthesise natural-language answers from across the catalogue.
At every stage, the concrete publishing decision that determines whether a metadata record succeeds is highlighted: a DOI and grant reference for harvesting, a recognised metadata standard for harmonisation, complete core fields for validation, and controlled-vocabulary keywords and geographic extent for augmentation and search. This work is aimed at Mission Soil data managers, data stewards, researchers, and Living Lab participants, with the practical message that understanding the pipeline is what enables soil data and knowledge providers to make their work findable today and preserved in EUSO at the JRC.

Climate change and soil biodiversity loss are deeply intertwined crises. A warming climate is intensifying extreme weather, including more frequent and severe flooding, while the ecosystems that buffer these impacts are themselves under growing pressure. Soil biodiversity sits at the centre of this nexus: the bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates in soil underpin soil structure, fertility, nutrient cycling, and water retention, and therefore agricultural productivity and many ecosystem services. Yet soil life is rarely accounted for in climate risk and adaptation planning, which has traditionally centred on infrastructure, the economy, and people.

This talk presents a Belgian use case in TerraTwin, a Horizon Europe project (HORIZON-MISS-2024-CLIMA-01-04) developing a holistic Digital Twin of Ecosystem (DTE) to better understand the interplay between climate change and marien and terrestrial biodiversity and to support data-driven decision-making. It will outline the design of the use case (its integrated methodology linking soil biodiversity, flood modelling, and climate scenarios) and what it will deliver for soils and climate.

The use case addresses soil-related biodiversity under future flooding in Flanders. Flanders has a mature flood risk management strategy under the EU Floods Directive (2007/60/EC), built on hydrodynamic models, high-resolution data, and detailed flood risk maps, but these assess impacts on infrastructure and people, not on soil ecosystems. We focus on coastal Flanders, where high biodiversity meets high flood vulnerability near the North Sea. Existing biodiversity and flood datasets will be combined to select priority regions. Soil biodiversity will then be characterized through field sampling and DNA metabarcoding of bacteria, fungi, and nematodes, building a local genetic reference baseline, while hydrodynamic models simulate coastal, fluvial, and pluvial flooding under moderate and high-emission scenarios. Overlaying flood projections with biodiversity data will produce soil-biodiversity risk maps showing where soil ecosystems are most threatened.

The intended outcomes (flood maps under different climate scenarios, a metabarcoding baseline, soil-biodiversity risk maps, and policy recommendations) aim to extend flood risk management beyond infrastructure to the living soil, and to inform nature-based solutions that protect biodiversity, soil health, and agriculture under a changing climate. The talk invites discussion with the soil-biodiversity, eDNA, and climate-adaptation communities on methods and comparable efforts across Europe.