Report on the national and EU regulations on agricultural soil data sharing and national monitoring activities
Abstract
EJPSOIL (https://ejpsoil.eu/) consortium works with 24 European countries, 20 of which are Member States. The work package 6 of EJP SOIL programme aims to support harmonised soil data sharing in Europe. The "Report on national and EU regulations on agricultural soil data sharing" reports the EU legal framework was performed related to the public soil data sharing policies and an inventory of the national transposition of the EU regulation, produced with the participation of 62 authors belonging to 32 institutions both research institutions and public bodies. A conflict of interests between public and private rights was evidenced because soil is a natural resource providing services for the public benefit (INSPIRE regulation) but is often under private property (GDPR). The D6.2 chapter 5 - Draft agreement for soil data sharing suggests general best practices to overcome the soil data sharing constraints: 1) to get the consent from landowners for the open disclosure of point georeferenced soil data, with the only exception that the consent is not required for data on emissions of pollutants into the environment, 2) to respect the intellectual property rights of authors, and/or an economic payment to sustain the sharing service of soil data and maps , and 3) to adopt a country-driven approach for European soil mapping which would imply involving the national soil data officers/services and through them the national soil data owners, with a common European methodology, similarly to what is adopted by the INSII network of the Global Soil Partnership. The "Report on national and EU regulations on agricultural soil data sharing" inventoried the institutions holding national and sub-national soil data finding that rarely they coincide with the competent authorities for INSPIRE implementation. The INSPIRE metadata portals and network services were also inventoried. Two model templates for soil data sharing were provided as annexed documents.