The first meeting of WORLDSOILS project, was succesfully held on 15 September online with the participation of all the partners of the consortium and the stakeholders that will be involved along the project.

The programme included introductions and getting to know each other, presentation about the project objectives, phases, schedule, feasibility studies and other practical issues.

The project will gather eight partners from both industrial and academic sectors aiming at developing a pre-operation Soil Monitoring System to provide yearly estimations of Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) at large scales.

The consortium will be supported by relevant stakeholders from EC JRC, EC DG GROW, EEA and FAO GSP (providing policy and programmatic guidance and linking the project to parallel on-going international activities), and from National Reference Centres of Soil (SPW, VUMOP and DEMETER ELGO) supporting the operations of the monitoring system for a period of at least one year and assessing the adequacy/benefits provided by the system from the end-user viewpoint.

This meeting was originally planned to be held in ESA-ESRIN facilities in Frascati (Italy) but it was changed to online due to the travel restrictions related to COVID-19 virus).