Environmental Monitoring Scientist
In September, the IGI team travelled to Birmingham for the kick-off meeting of REGENSOILL. This new €12M project is funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe programme. Over the next 4.5 years, it will bring together 26 partners from 12 countries to tackle the challenge of polluted and degraded brownfield land.
Brownfields are areas of land that were once used for industrial, commercial or other activities and are now abandoned, underused or degraded. Their soils can be polluted or damaged by past use, which can harm ecosystems and human health and limits opportunities for sustainable urban development.
REGENSOILL will create a network of five transdisciplinary Living Labs to support the clean-up and sustainable redevelopment of brownfields across Europe. The labs are located in Birmingham (UK), Budapest (HU), Lille Métropole (FR), Upper Silesia (PL) and a Baltic cluster covering Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Conventional clean-up can involve excavating contaminated soil and taking it to landfill. REGENSOILL will instead explore nature-based and circular economy approaches that work with natural processes to restore soil health.
This is a first for IGI. Our software and expertise have been built around geochemistry, helping organisations manage, integrate and interpret complex geochemical data. REGENSOILL is the first project where we're taking that capability into a new domain: soils.
Our Metis platform lets users manage sample data across a wide range of physical and chemical properties all in one place. In REGENSOILL, the five Living Labs will produce varied datasets from very different sites. IGI will develop the project's data infrastructure, with sample data from the Living Labs flowing into Metis, where it will be harmonised, given consistent metadata and managed alongside information on data quality and uncertainty. This will make results from different sites directly comparable.
Data integration goes well beyond the project itself. We'll combine REGENSOILL's data with other relevant sources, including Copernicus Earth observation data, the EU Soil Observatory (EUSO) and the SoilWise open soil data repository. We'll then make the integrated data available through a standard API to the project's partners and decision support tools. The data will also be shared back, helping REGENSOILL contribute to Europe's wider soil knowledge base and support the move towards Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) soil data.
It was great to meet the consortium in person in Birmingham, and we're looking forward to working with our partners over the coming years. We'll share updates as the project develops.
To find out more about the project, visit the REGENSOILL website: [https://regensoill.eu/]
