Forest Focus is a Community scheme for harmonised, broad-based, comprehensive and long-term monitoring of European forest ecosystems. It concentrates in particular on protecting forests against air pollution and fire. To supplement the monitoring system, new instruments relating to soil monitoring, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, climate change and protective functions of forests are to be developed.

Forest Focus BIOSOIL project
The Joint Research Centre in Ispra, which has responsibility for the management and co-ordination of the scientific and technical aspects of the EU Forest Focus regulation, convened a group of European soil experts to finalise a ‘BioSoil’ demonstration project as part of the overall Forest Focus programme. The project will include a soil module and a biodiversity module and will be managed in Great Britain by Forest Research’s soil scientists.
The project is based on a strategy of describing and sampling soils at all sites of a 16x16 km network that fall onto forested land, and will be the single largest soil monitoring exercise implemented so far at the EU scale.
It will therefore be a test for the development of operational soil monitoring.
Its primary aim is to establish an improved common European baseline of forest soils for environmental applications. Such applications include: investigation of acidification and/or eutrophication; carbon stock assessment, impacts of climatic changes. Another project objective is to evaluate methodology before EUwide monitoring programmes for other land use types are set up.
The soil survey element will involve detailed soil description, sampling and classification using FAO’s World Reference Base (http://www.fao.org/ag/sagl/agll/wrb/default.stm). Following a recent tender, two teams of UK soil surveyors have been selected. Andrew Hipkin will be responsible for the Scottish soil survey and Land Research Associates will cover the soil survey in England and Wales.
FR’s Elena Vanguelova recently participated in an EU training course on World Reference Base Soil Profile Description (WRB) and Classification, along with the UK soil surveyors. The course focused on soil profile description according to FAO guidelines and on soil classification according to WRB. “The training is invaluable to help ensure that FR uses the same terminology and soil sampling protocols as our European colleagues,” commented Elena.