Editorial for Special Issue on “Soil Solutions for a Sustainable World”

Soil is a vitally important resource supplying numerous ecosystem services such as the provision of food, water purification, nutrient regulation, and biodiversity (Adhikari and Hartemink 2016; Pereira et al. 2018). At the same time soils are increasingly impacted by natural and anthropogenic soil threats such as erosion, contamination and sealing (JRC: Institute for Environment and Sustainability et al. 2015). For example, Sonderegger and Pfister (2021) estimate a long-term global productivity loss of 15% in high-input production areas, of which 43% is due to compaction and 57% due to erosion. The past decades have seen a worldwide increasing pressure on soils due to population growth (Brown 1981), which led to ongoing urbanization (Sun et al. 2023), intensification of agriculture (Kopittke et al. 2019) and a decrease in the maintenance of traditional land use–land management systems, such as extensive ranging or hedgerows and terraces (Plieninger et al. 2006; Arnaiz-Schmitz et al. 2018; Durán et al. 2020). In addition to these developments, climate change, with increases in extreme weather events, both in terms of longer meteorological droughts as well as shorter, more intense rainfall events (Furtak and Wolińska 2023), has led to more frequent and more severe floods and droughts and a worldwide increase in soil degradation (Montanarella et al. 2016). Thus the ecosystem services provided by soils are declining due to anthropogenic activities, while at the same time mankind is dependent on these different ecosystem services. In view of these challenges, there is a move in research and practice toward more sustainable soil and land management to recover degraded soils and maintain or improve soil health, namely the capacity of soil to function (Lehmann et al. 2020). The ecosystem services supplied by soils are the result of multiple concurrently acting soil functions, which can be supported by sustainable soil and land management using e.g., land management frameworks (Schulte et al. 2014). The United Nations (1992) defines sustainable land management (SLM) as “The use of land resources, including soils, water, animals and plants, for the production of goods to meet changing human needs, while simultaneously ensuring the long-term productive potential of these resources and the maintenance of their environmental functions.” Despite the development of decision support systems at the field scale (Debeljak et al. 2019), quantification of the influence of sustainable land management practices on several soil functions remains challenging. Important steps to improve this quantification are the inclusion of biological soil indicators in soil health assessments (Vazquez et al. 2025), improvement of spatiotemporal measurement methods (Otten et al. 2021), as well as modeling soil processes, and functions at different scales (Zeng et al. 2025; Bancheri et al. 2025). In addition, for the assessment of the influence of sustainable soil management on soil functions in space and time, monitoring, mapping and (uncertainty) assessment methods are necessary (Poggio et al. 2016; Orgiazzi et al. 2018; Helfenstein et al., 2024). By delivering important ecosystem services, soils have the potential to contribute to solving several global challenges through so-called Nature Based Solutions (NBS) (Sowińska-Świerkosz and García 2022). NBS are defined by the European Commission as “Solutions that are inspired and supported by nature, which are cost-effective, simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help build resilience. Such solutions bring more, and more diverse, nature and natural features and processes into cities, landscapes and seascapes, through locally adapted, resource-efficient, and systemic interventions.” NBS are considered an essential element for the sustainable development of urban blue-green infrastructures and an efficient tool to enhance ecosystem services, e.g., flood mitigation, climate adaptation, and biodiversity maintenance (DeLosRíos-White et al. 2020). This special issue holds contributions to these four key themes of the Wageningen Soil Conference 2023, which will be summarized in the following. Sustainable land management, as outlined in the introduction, is considered an important target by national regulations and international agreements (Montanarella and Panagos 2021). Joint efforts of scientists, policymakers, and practitioners are needed to protect soil health and soil resources for future generations (Hou et al. 2020). It is important to raise awareness about soil health? and ensure long-term soil health and related ecosystem services by protecting and restoring soils, and promoting sustainable management practices. Even though the role of soils for society is crucial, it is challenging to evaluate complex interactions between soils and society to support decision-making. In his contribution to this special issue, Groffman (2025) reviews challenges and opportunities related to the interaction between soil science and society. Case studies reflecting the current booming interest in soil science by society and related to soil carbon sequestration, urban gardening and green infrastructure are presented and discussed. Groffman (2025) highlights the need for transdisciplinary and participatory approaches together with advances in basic and applied science, and effective communication strategies between science and society, which consider the context and do not overpromise, to tackle the limitations related to these societally relevant issues. From a practical perspective, living labs are increasingly used to support soil health analysis and offer the benefit of easy engagement with a variety of societal stakeholders (Schuurman et al. 2016; Arias-Navarro et al. 2023; Taskin et al. 2025). When created in cities, they can support maximization of ecosystem services, such as microclimate regulation and carbon sequestration, offered by urban green areas (Voytenko et al. 2016; Nesti 2018). Vasenev et al. (2025), in this issue, propose that university campuses are promising settings for urban living labs and support this perspective with a few examples on quantifying carbon and heat fluxes in green spaces of Wageningen University campus. As a university-based living lab is often driven by research, they stress that collaboration with stakeholders and translating knowledge to end-users, including municipalities, practitioners, and/or local communities is key for the long-term viability of such labs. In this context, to optimize the potential for improving soil health, it is important to take a step back and reflect on how soil science is currently carried out. Soil scientists are trained to use scientific methods to generate knowledge on soil. In their perspective, Wiersma and Lopez (2024) challenge the position that soil scientists should take with respect to their research and suggest a “reflecting and doing” framework for this. They propose that, to reach soil solutions for a sustainable world, a transdisciplinary approach is required that connects diverse types of soil knowledge. Rather than only focusing on soils for society, the three-way connections between society, soil and scientist should be strengthened. Soil is an open, dynamic system, and processes of heat, water and substance transfer between solid, liquid, gaseous, and life phases drive soil formation and functioning (Blume et al. 2016). Soil interactions with plants, biota, groundwater, and atmosphere contribute to carbon, nutrient, and energy fluxes (De Deyn and Kooistra 2021). Advanced measurement techniques as well as modeling can be used to enhance the understanding of soil processes (Vereecken et al. 2016), which is in turn important to support decision-making for rational soil and land management. Different advanced measurement methods and designs were presented and evaluated at the conference. For the measurement of soil physical properties, Pepers et al. (2024) present the new Rho C sensor for rapid field and dry bulk density measurements in the field. This sensor can be used for rapid monitoring of soil compaction for soil health assessments, to support assessment and advice on sustainable land management practices. Pirlot et al. (2024) show with a detailed spatial and temporal sampling design, how soil physical properties vary in space and time for different crop production systems. They show the importance of taking this influence of multi-cropping systems on the spatiotemporal dynamics in water retention properties into account, to correctly assess the future performance of different production systems. The rhizosphere is a zone of high biogeochemical activity, thereby having a key contribution to soil carbon sequestration and nutrient cycling. A better understanding of the rhizosphere functioning would aid the development of models that focus on these important soil functions (Kuppe et al. 2022). In their contribution to this issue, Niedeggen et al. (2024) investigate microbial growth on a variety of root-derived substrates. Their results suggest more complex patterns of rhizodeposits' mineralization than derived from individual model substrates. Their work supports new formulations of kinetic parameters used for modeling microbial growth, which allow a better understanding of the role of rhizodeposition in microbial carbon and nutrient cycling and how this can ultimately support ecosystem services. Advances in understanding soil pollution or soil degradation were also presented. Through the analysis of a chrono sequence of measurements of microplastics in soil after bio-solid applications Walker and Aherne (2024) assess the fate (transport, degradation) of microplastics in bio-solid amended agricultural soils in Southern Ontario, Canada. This can be used to understand and reduce plastic pollution as well as to inform plastic policy changes. Rousseau et al. (2024) study the acidification in forests and bring evidence for the necessity of including severely acidified forests in conservation programs. They investigate the effect of soil acidification in Dutch and German forests on bacterial diversity, alongside the potential implications for nutrient cycling. The authors point out that ongoing soil acidification in these forests negatively impacts bacterial diversity, favoring taxa that degrade recalcitrant compounds and diminishing taxa associated with nitrogen cycling. These results highlight the ongoing disruption of forest ecosystem functioning and the need to continue monitoring to assess current and prevent further degradation. Besides agricultural fields and forests, grasslands are also important ecosystems for society that contribute to food security and climate change mitigation (O'Mara 2012) and are impacted by multiple drivers and threats (Sollenberger et al. 2019; Bardgett et al. 2021). Barneze et al. (2024) investigate how climate warming and different management strategies interact to impact total grassland soil respiration as well as the different processes contributing to this flux. Their work highlights how difficult it is to predict interactive effects, even if the effects of an individual driver like climate warming are significant. Process-based modeling approaches might allow the further quantification of water, gas and heat transport, carbon turnover, nutrient cycles, and other soil processes. Linking soil processes to land use change and climate change scenarios enables projecting future dynamics in soil health and functionality. Exploring relationships between soil-forming factors, soil properties, functions, and ecosystem services with external drivers and management across scales is a fundamental challenge, addressed by a variety of monitoring, mapping and evaluating approaches (Helfenstein et al., 2024). Remote and proximal sensing provide new opportunities to collect soil data with high spatial and temporal resolution at a relatively low cost, and generate “big data” sets of soil information (Hu et al. 2025). Advanced techniques of statistical spatiotemporal modeling, such as geostatistics and machine learning, allow for transforming soil data into high-resolution maps and decision-support systems. Digital soil mapping at the country scale is critically important to support policies and governance on sustainable land use and soil protection. Although digital soil maps have been developed for many countries such as the Netherlands (Helfenstein et al., 2024), France (Chen et al. 2020), and China (Liang et al. 2019), there are still enough challenges, e.g., to add new soil properties, predict processes at the landscape scale or increase spatial resolution. In this special issue, Vîrghileanu et al. (2024) show how, based on the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE, Renard et al. 1994), the effect of various land cover and land use management practices on erosion can be mapped and assessed as well as how this can be used as a tool for decision-making in searching for sustainable soil-use solutions. Robb et al. (2025) address the challenges of increasing spatial resolution in soil mapping by developing a 10-m resolution map of soil carbon content, bulk density, organic layer thickness, profile depth, and peat extent in Scotland. Among the tested machine-learning techniques, the histogram-based gradient boosting regression tree yielded the most accurate maps of soil carbon content (r2 = 0.78), which allows for considerable improvement of existing national estimates of soil carbon stocks and supports decision-making, by prioritizing the most vulnerable areas, such as peatlands. Using such high-resolution mapping of soil properties, Macfarlane et al. (2024) study degradation of the peatland soils in Scotland. Combining artificial intelligence (deep learning) techniques with 25-cm resolution imagery allows for detection of over 40,000 m of drainage channels and for developing detailed maps of erosion features. This is a considerable contribution to more accurate and detailed reporting on greenhouse gas emissions from the area. The concept of nature-based solutions (NBS) promotes working with natural ‘tools’, to address societal challenges, to protect and sustainably manage natural and modified ecosystems with high effectiveness and economic efficiency (Sowińska-Świerkosz and García 2022). In soils, the physical, chemical and biological properties can be considered such natural tools. Soil structure dynamics as influenced by soil biota play an important role in carbon dynamics, nutrient cycling, and soil hydrological processes (Blouin et al. 2013; Iven et al. 2023), influencing the water filtering capacity and mitigating extreme events like floods and droughts (Reck et al. 2018; Saco et al. 2021). Soils can be biogeochemical barriers to immobilize potentially toxic elements like trace metals (Li et al. 2022), pesticides (Arias-Estévez et al. 2008) and PFAS (Bolan et al. 2021). Diversity and functionality of soil biota are highly relevant for sustainable land management projects, including the revitalization of degraded lands, nature conservation or biodiversity-positive food systems (Calliari et al. 2022). Today, NBS is one of the crucial pillars in the EU political and executive agenda, and the role of soil health in NBS planning and implementation is getting increasingly recognized. The paper by Calfapietra et al. (2025) reviews 6 EU-funded projects focused on NBS for protection, restoration and management of forest, wetland, agricultural, and urban ecosystems, and presents soil health indicators used to evaluate the NBS performance. In the context of the EU, NBS, and soil policy development during the last 30 years, the paper highlights best practices, gaps and challenges to integrate soil health into NBS in research and international regulations. NBS are considered an essential element for the sustainable development of urban blue-green infrastructures (BGI) and an efficient tool to enhance ecosystem services (ES); however the role of soils in the provisioning of these ES remains overlooked in urban planning. Séré et al. (2024) develop a decision-support system (DSS) to evaluate the ES supply by urban soils based on the scoring of 15 soil functions and link them to the ES demand in 13 soil covers typical for different functional areas in cities (e.g., industrial sites, brownfields, recreational, and residential areas). The DSS was tested in three urban areas in France and revealed the high potential of urban soils to provide important ES and support BGI. The level of anthropization was not correlated with the average soil functions' scores, claiming that even strongly anthropogenically disturbed soils can be important for sustainable urban development. The width of topics experienced in the contributions to the Wageningen Soil Conference 2023 as well as to this special issue represented progress made in soil research, in the very broad sense. Together, the contributions lead to increased holistic understanding of the soil properties and processes, their links to ecosystem services, as well as the importance of soils and society interactions. There seems to be increasing awareness of the role soils can play for a sustainable future. In view of the challenges of increasing population pressure as well as land use and climate change, this is an important development, which will hopefully lead to an increase in the application of effective sustainable land management worldwide. We look forward to the next Wageningen Soil Conference, which is planned for 2027, where we hope for equally inspiring scientific presentations and discussions! Loes van Schaik: conceptualization, writing – original draft, writing – review and editing. Mathilde Hagens: conceptualization, writing – original draft, writing – review and editing. Slava Vasenev: conceptualization, writing – original draft, writing – review and editing. Giulia Bongiorno: conceptualization, writing – original draft, writing – review and editing. We thank all participants of the conference and more specifically the authors of the contributions to this special issue. The Wageningen Soil Conference is a joint initiative of the soil groups of Wageningen University (Soil Science cluster) together with Wageningen Environmental Research and the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC). The authors declare no conflicts of interest. As this is an editorial, we do not present or analyze any data.