Long-term Experiments

Our central strategy is based on the principle of sustainable agriculture that promotes long-term environmental health, economic profitability, and social equity based on resilient and persistent agroecosystems. Alternative soil management practices designed to tackle these principles are: 1) reduced tillage, 2) organic fertilization, 3) cover cropping 4) crop residue retention and their combinations.

These practices and their combinations are studied in 13 long-term experiments with the potential to scale up regionally in seven counties along a North-South climate gradient across Europe (Fig.1). These long-term experiments cover a range of pedoclimatic conditions and are designed to study a number of alternative soil management practices and their combinations in main European cropping systems, thus will provide a robust data set for the European scale assessment as well as for the calibration and evaluation of ) the ecosystem model used in upscaling of the impacts of soil management practices and ii) soil carbon decision support models.

Fig.1 Location of long-term experiments across North-South climate gradient. Click on the map for more information.