Soil Navigator

One of the 3 main pillars of the Landmark project was the development of a Decision Support Tool (DSS) for farmers and farm advisors, which we call the Soil Navigator DSS (Debeljak et al., 2019). The Soil Navigator is an agricultural decision support system (DSS) for assessing and optimizing soil functions. Most agricultural DSS are focused on short-term goals for the next growing season, such as increasing plant available nutrients or optimizing crop yield, whereas other important soil functions such as water purification and regulation, carbon sequestration and biodiversity provision are neglected. Making the right management decisions for long-term sustainability is therefore challenging, and farmers and farm advisors would greatly benefit from an evidence-based DSS targeted for assessing and improving the supply of several soil functions simultaneously. The Soil Navigator DSS provides a menu of user-friendly soil management strategies to manage the soil functions on individual fields on the farm (local scale). The menu is stratified by pedo-climatic zones, land uses ( cropland and grassland) and farming systems.