Reflections on large benefits in producing soil information in SOILS4MED project: Tunisia case study

In the Mediterranean region, and in particular in the Near East and North Africa Mediterranean (NENA) countries, there is urgent need to enhance availability and use of soil data and information (SDI) and of harmonized methodologies to realize standardized soil information systems (SIS) as enabling conditions to monitor and improve soil health and support policies to achieve land degradation neutrality (LDN) and other Sustainable Development Goals. In the framework of the PRIMA-funded SOILS4MED project, all countries involved are collaborating to create country-owned standardized soil information systems (NSIS) to collect and manage harmonized SDI. Some NENA countries such as Tunisia have various SDI collected across many decades since the mid-1900s, but often stored in non-digital format, poorly accessible, yet not standardized and harmonized. The NSIS will facilitate the management, update, visualization and use of the data. It will include existing soil point data and maps, and laboratory data, that will allow to produce soil quality, health and degradation indicators, soil fertility, constraints, degradation, and land capability maps. The NSIS, in Tunisia, will be first used to update the agricultural map, of primary importance for rural development plans, and secondarily to implement models and pedotransfer functions to calculate erosion rates and risk, and physical properties (e.g. water retention, field capacity, erodibility, water infiltration, proneness to compaction and salinization), fundamental for crop performance evaluation and improvement, for mitigating environmental degradation and for restoration planning. The NSIS will also allow to assess and monitor the efficiency and sustainability of land uses and management practices. The NSIS will implement use cases embedded in Soil Living Labs (LL) established in Tunisia. A use case is the connected flows of actions defining the interactions between agricultural actors and NSIS, as well as other relevant data and tools, to achieve specific objectives. These LL-embedded use cases will make SDI understandable and usable by all stakeholders from international/national to local levels, and potentially even by farmers.