EDAPHOS

Advanced mapping, risk assessment and nature-based depollution methods are combined to accelerate the recovery of contaminated soils and ensure that ecological restoration enters mainstream business

Coordinatore di progetto: COMMUNAUTE D' UNIVERSITES ET ETABLISSEMENTS UNIVERSITE BOURGOGNE - FRANCHE – COMTE (UBFC), UBFC

Ambiti di ricerca: Agronomia e sistemi colturali erbacei ed ortofloricoli

Responsabile Scientifico: Andrea Monti

Durata: 01/09/2023 - 31/08/2027

Gruppo di ricerca: Andrea Monti, Walter Zegada Lizarazu, Giuseppina Balzano, Erika Facciola, Andrea Parenti.

EDAPHOS proposes a holistic and innovative land management approach to contribute to the Mission “A Soil Deal for EU” and to its specific objective “Reduce soil pollution and enhance restoration”. EDAPHOS will develop a framework for land rehabilitation and ecological restoration of contaminated areas featuring nature-based solutions (NBS) tech-nologies, to accelerate the recovery of contaminated lands to a healthy ecosystem status and making ecological resto-ration a mainstream business endeavor. EDAPHOS will improve the monitoring of contaminated soils and the under-standing of precise pollution sources at selected EU regions by combining robust remote sensing tools and GIS-based methods that will be applied at representative territorial lands. Site-specific risk assessment methods and metrics, based on the TRIAD concept and considering the sources, the pathways, the exposure and effects of soil pollution, will be developed and applied on 7 case studies. EDAPHOS will perform lab and field studies to validate the technological readiness and the cost-effectiveness of NBS as effective remediation strategy for reducing soil contamination in urban, peri-urban and rural settings and land uses. EDAPHOS will assess the environmental, social and economic impacts of selected NBS sites and will develop the most suitable quantitative metrics and KPIs that depict accurately and reliably their integrated socio-environmental performance in both terms of economic benefit (e.g. growth of ecosystem ser-vices value, final phytoremediation compounds for further industrial valorization) and cost prevention (e.g. environ-mental footprint reduction) potentials, along with tailored ecological finance instruments for establishing a self-sus-tained and replicable EU NBS market. With the aim of providing data-driven tools for forecasting, analyzing and estab-lishing quantitative relationship of multi-scale processes, artificial intelligence techniques will be implemented throughout the project.