On September 2025, two members of PHISHES – Alexandra Murray from DHI and Nicolas Devau form BRGM participated in the yearly meeting of the SOILPROM project, a Mission Soil sister project funded under the same HORIZON-MISS-2023-SOIL-01-02 “Soil pollution processes – modelling and inclusion in advanced digital decision-support tools “.
SOILPROM (Modelling pollutant transport across the soil-water-atmosphere continuum, and impacts on ecosystem services) aims to enhance soil pollution modelling for contaminants with high risk for the environment and human health including metals, PFAS, nutrients, microplastics, and pesticides. Models focus on 13 different soil-related processes across soil, water, and atmosphere compartments, studied within the 7 SOILPROM use-cases. It uses existing European databases and collects new standardised local datasets in accordance with EUSO requirements. SOILPROM will provide access to soil pollution information via a modelling platform and support stakeholders towards sustainable land management strategies and policies for healthy soils in Europe.
Further to the presentation of PHISHES and the SOILPROM meeting, the discussion evolved around the similarities and differences between the two projects. Three issues were discussed in more detail:
- How to make the PHISHES and SOILPROM platforms sustainable after the end of the projects;
- Methodologies for moving from quantitative modelling results to information relative to ecosystem services;
- Sharing data from PHISHES and SOILPROM test sites for validation purposes, taking into account data confidentiality.
From the discussions it was clear that for both projects, the primary bottlenecks lie in the modelling of soil functions and associated ecosystem services (Figure 1). The model trains developed in the two project are different: in PHISHES there are developments around the MIKE SHE distributed hydrologic model and the DAISY soil-plant model, while in SOILPROM there is a strong focus on the BODIUM model.
Figure 1: Linkeage between soil characteristics and soil functions and associated ecosystem services according to recent ISO standards