EUROPEAN SOIL NUTRIENT IMBALANCES

Europe has a serious imbalance in terms of availability of nutrients for agriculture. Climatic and orographic conditions have led to the separation of agriculture and livestock production. The need to reduce food production costs has led to the centralization of livestock and agricultural production systems, leading to geographic nutrient imbalances; while areas with low crop yield potential have transitioned to intensive livestock farming relying on food imports, high yielding crop areas in many cases have not introduced livestock in the agro-system. Thus, Europe has been zoned, with areas with nutrient excess (high livestock areas, areas close to the coast, orographically complicated areas, etc.) and areas of high nutrient demand (areas where intensive cropping has depleted soil nutrients, soil organic matter, caused decreases in microbiological diversity, etc.). The project SEA2LAND identifies the areas with excesses or deficits of nutrients, and quantifies these nutrient imbalances. Depending on the needs of the pilot study areas, the recovered wastes will be transformed to optimize their use in agriculture (local use to minimize transport). This knowledge will be combined with results obtained in the different pilot areas to develop a framework for the diagnosis of territorial nutrient imbalances and identification of possible solutions. The results are available to be consulted on a especific tool created under the SEA2LAND project framework called Map Visor https://sea2landgisviewer.eu/ This publication on Zenodo is a dataset built collecting the published information from various sources: official statistics institutes, research centres, associations of producers, etc. This information will include main crops, soil characteristics, “waste” streams, orographic and climatic conditions, facilities in the area, etc. Territorial difficulties (road network, technological ecosystem, legal issues, administrative oversight, etc.) will be taken into account. The inventory/map has been developed at nut 3 calculating the imbalances (nut 3) for N, P, K, organic matter and micronutrients.