Catia Bastioli is a chemist, researcher and entrepreneur. She is CEO of Novamont, President of Terna Spa of the Kyoto Club Association and of the Italian Technological Cluster of Green Chemistry SPRING, and member of the Board of Directors of Fondazione Cariplo. She has been developing and field-studying the model of biorefineries integrated in the local areas, where the primary objective is an efficient use of resources and priority is given to high value-added products (bioplastics and biochemicals), short value-chains and a system-based economy. This represents a cultural (before than economical) development model, based on territorial regeneration that starts from decommissioned chemical sites and uses local biodiversity and scraps in order to give origin to renewable raw materials, capitalizing research and innovation and involving different stakeholders (institutions, research bodies, actors of the agricultural and industrial world). The innovative technologies developed for the bioplastics integrated supply-chain have led to the foundation and growth of a series of companies, that today form part of the Novamont Group.
She has been a member of important EU working groups on climate change, environment and renewable raw materials, such as the European Union Bioeconomy Panel. Prime inventor of around 80 patent families in the sector of synthetic and natural polymers and transformation processes of renewable raw materials, she was awarded “European Inventor of the Year 2007” by the European Patent Office and the European Commission for her inventions related to starch-based bioplastics between 1991 and 2001.

My research focuses on the ecosystem services provided by soil organisms. I am especially interested in finding ways to promote soil biological services and to integrate them into agricultural systems to enhance the sustainability of production.

After working on the role of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in reducing nutrient losses from soil during my PhD at Agroscope and the University of Zürich, I relocated to the US for postdoctoral studies at UC Davis and UC Berkeley. There, I expanded my research focus on studying the effects of agricultural management on a range of soil organisms and the resulting consequences for ecosystem functioning. Since 2019 I am working as Team leader for soil ecological engineering in the research group Plant-Soil Interactions at Agroscope and the research group Agroecology and Plant-Microbiome interactions at the University of Zürich. There, I was recently leading a nationwide Citizen Science project investigating soil health across Switzerland.

Elena Biagi is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Civil, Chemical, Environmental and Materials Engineering of the University of Bologna. She holds a PhD in Applied Biocatalysis and Industrial Biotechnology. Her current main research interests reside in environmental microbiology, in particular in terms of compositional and functional characterization of environmental microbial communities involved in processes of interest (i.e. bioremediation and soil restoration). She acted as Scientific Project manager for a EU funded H2020 project (CIRCLES) and is now involved in other HORIZON EU projects that focuses on increase of soil productivity (TRIBIOME) and bioremediation of industrially polluted soil (NYMPHE). She published 90 articles in international scientific journals with >7000 citations (Scopus H-index, 39).

I have been working as a senior scientist in the department of soil sciences at the research institute for organic agriculture FiBL for the last six years. Before, I was a postdoc with Marcel van der Heijden at Agroscope. My research focuses on the effect of management systems on the soil microbiome, breeding for resistance to drought, and improving inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi.

Pascal Boivin is professor of Soil Science, president of the European Confederation of Soil Science Societies. He is leading research in soil physics, on soil quality indicators, soil quality management, and regenerative agriculture. With his group, he is focusing on the impact of soil organic carbon and soil organic carbon forms on soil physical and biological quality, and on how farming practices influence soil quality and soil organic carbon content.

I am a leader group of Agricultural Microbiology in the Department of Geomicrobiology, Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw, Poland. My scientific interests are related to the application of various groups of microorganisms to the regeneration of both agricultural and contaminated soils. In this field, I work on the improvement of the chemical, physical and (micro)biological quality of soil that directly affects plants’ health. Among my special scientific interest are the very close relationships between microbes and plants in the particular stages of the biological development of plants as well as the various possibilities of plants’ biofortification by microbial cells and/or their metabolites. My research is realized in the frame of Polish and international scientific grants in cooperation with Polish, Italian, Czech and Netherlands scientists.

Alyssa Deluz is completing a PhD thesis on the biological quality of agricultural soils. This project, funded by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, is a partnership between the Haute école du paysage, d’ingénierie et d’architecture de Genève (HEPIA), the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL, and ETH Zürich.

I am a Geographer with emphasis on Soils Science, Plant Ecology and Geomorphology. I did my PhD on the effects of soil erosion on soil carbon dynamics at different temporal and spatial scales. I apply both experimental and modeling approaches in my research. My interests focus on the connections and feedbacks between different environmental cycles in soils (C-​N-P Dynamics) and how human activities and Global Change influence these cycles and soils as a resource.

I am a first year NERC ECORISC PhD student at the University of Sheffield. My work focuses on arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) community composition, structure, and function (e.g., nutrient transfer). I am particularly interested in how pharmaceuticals, inadvertently introduced into the agro-environment, impact these aspects of the AM symbiosis. Previously, I found that human-use antifungal pharmaceuticals, which enter soils through biosolid application, impair nutrient transfer between AM fungi and crop plants (Durant, et al., in prep). Now, I am shifting my focus onto various veterinary pharmaceuticals, introduced to soils following manure application, and how they impact the community composition, structure, and function of AM fungi.

My research interests are focused on the widespread interactions between plant roots and symbiotic fungi, together known as mycorrhizas. I use isotope tracers, environmental physiology and metabolomics to explore the exchanges of plant-carbon and fungal-acquired nutrients between mycorrhizal symbionts. My particular interests lie in how diverse mycorrhizas, including Mucoromycotina ‘fine root endophytes’, respond and interact with biotic and abiotic factors, in both evolutionary and applied contexts. Our research is helping us to understand the role mycorrhizal fungi may have played in the colonisation of Earth’s terrestrial environment by plants >500 million years ago, and how we might be able to use mycorrhizal fungi to reduce future agricultural usage of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Our research also seeks to understand the influence of emerging contaminants on mycorrhizal symbiosis and is helping to inform crop breeding programmes to produce the next generation of mycorrhiza-friendly crops.
I completed my PhD in environmental physiology in 2009 at the University of Sheffield before getting into mycorrhizas during my postdoctoral studies (2009-2015), also at Sheffield. I got my first academic post at the University of Leeds in 2015, moving there as a University Academic Fellow and becoming Professor in 2019. I moved back to the University of Sheffield this summer (2020) as Professor of Plant-Soil Processes.

I received my Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Chemical Engineering at Politecnico di Torino (Italy). I started to focus my work on environmental issues during the Master’s Degree, graduating in 2021 with a Thesis committed to water microplastics pollution, which led me to my first scientific publication of a review paper. In 2022 I started the PhD in Chemical Engineering at Politecnico di Torino and in collaboration with Re Soil Foundation, focusing my research on soil ecosystem.

I am a Post Doc in Christine Allwell's group at the University of Basel. I am an agricultural engineer by training and did my master's in Remote Sensing (RS) and GIS specializing in agriculture and soils. I did my Ph.D. in environmental science from ETH Zurich. My work is focused on the global mapping of soil hydraulic properties, linking hydraulic properties with soil erosion estimation, and application of Remote Sensing (RS), and GIS on agriculture and hydrology.

Niels Halberg is Director of the Danish Centre for Food and Agriculture (DCA), Aarhus University (AU). He is responsible for coordination and organisation of the approximately 30M Euro annual contract with the Ministry for Food and Agriculture on science-based policy advice and industry collaboration. Niels chairs the Board of Programme managers in EJP Soil, and is the coordinator of two CSAs (Prepsoil.eu and nati00ns.eu) supporting the EU Soil Health Mission.
For 25 years, he has been conducting research in organic agriculture, cropping and dairy systems, agroecology and food systems, environmental assessment of farming systems and food (LCA), and value chains. He was the coordinator of the deepfrontier (au.dk) project researching deep root development from 2014-2020. His broad experience includes international research collaborations in Europe, Asia, East Africa and Brazil.

I'm a research assistance on the OTH in Regensburg and work on a project so called ELISE (Electron-ical Lab for Intelligent Soil Examination). This project aims to prepare and perform soil samples by microscope automatically. The produced images are observed by image recognition to quantify and extrapolate bacteria and fungi are present in the sample

Anatol is a PhD candidate in the Soil Geography and Landscape group at Wageningen University, where he works under the supervision of Dr. Titia Mulder, Prof. dr. Gerard Heuvelink and Dr. Mirjam Hack-ten Broeke. He is currently working on a project to develop a high resolution 4D soil modelling and mapping platform for the Netherlands, or "Bodemkundig Informatie Systeem 4D" (BIS-4D). Anatol is a soil scientist who completed a BSc in Geosciences from the University of Basel and a MSc in Environmental Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich with a Major in Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics. His main interest lies in using proxy and sensing methods, large datasets and statistical models to map soils over space and time to make sustainable land use decisions.

Peter Lehman is a Senior scientist and Lecturer at ETH Zurich. His research focuses on soil physics from pore to global scale.

Jens Leifeld is Head of the research group Climate and Agriculture at Agroscope, Switzerland. His research focuses on carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions from organic soils.

Stefanie Lutz is a microbial ecologist and team leader in Rhizosphere Ecology in the Plant-Soil Interactions Group at Agroscope. Her work focuses on harnessing plant-beneficial soil and root microbiomes through indirect (identification and promotion of favourable management practices) or direct (inoculation of beneficial organisms) approaches and how we can exploit them to reduce the need for synthetic pesticides and fertilisers. She also explores the context-dependencies of field inoculations with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, the predictability of inoculation success and how we can harness the full potential of the mycorrhizal symbiosis to improve agricultural sustainability and productivity.

Amanda Matson is a senior scientist in the Soil, Water and Land Use team at Wageningen University and Research. With a background in soil biogeochemistry of agricultural and forest systems, she is currently focused on soil health. Her particular interests are the selection and use of soil indicators to support decision-making around sustainable soil use and management, as well as how innovative sensor and isotope techniques can provide insight into soils at different scales.

I am currently a post doctoral researcher at Agroscope, the Swiss centre for agricultural research in the department of field-crop systems and plant nutrition. My work focuses on the use of visible and near infrared spectroscopy to predict soil parameters related to soil quality and soil fertility. My main project is part of the agroscope research project INDICATE, where we develop indicators to measure farm environmental impacts, more specifically in the proximal sensing project, which focuses on the use of vis-NIR spectroscopy for soil indicators. Additionally, I also participate in the H2020 EJP SOIL project ProbeField where the application of vis-NIR spectroscopy in-situ is examined

Dr. Oyserman is a Syngenta scientist investigating Soil Health. A focus of his research is the microbiome, plant-microbe interactions, and the impact of chemistries on the ecology of symbiosis.

Claudia Preininger is a senior researcher at Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH. She coordinates the project www.net-microplastic.eu. Her research is focused on formulation development, biopolymer-based (plastic free) coatings for slow-release fertilizers, and biobased biological formulations for biocontrol and plant growth promotion, including seed treatment, composite coatings, capsules, beads, granules, and foliar spray.

I have a PhD from the University of Coimbra, Portugal in co-supervision with the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, where I studied the effects of metal mixtures on soil invertebrate communities and functioning. Since 2021, I am a soil ecotoxicologist at the Ecotox Centre, where I look to understand the effects of contaminants on soil organisms. In particular I focus on the testing, development and standardization of biological test methods for the soil compartment. Among other project I lead the ConSoil project which aims at proposing a biomonitoring approach, aimed at protecting long term soil fertility, for plant protection product residues in soil.

Matthias Rillig is a soil ecologist interested in uncovering the effects of factors of global change on soil processes and biodiversity, with an organismal focus on fungi (including mycorrhizal fungi). Current research in his group addresses the role of multiple concurrent factors of global change on terrestrial ecosystems, and explores the use of soil fungi to address ecological principles. Many lab members work on microplastic effects in soils. Work takes place in agroecosystems, but also grasslands and other ecosystem types.
Matthias earned a PhD from University of California, Davis/ San Diego State University (1997). He has been a faculty member at University of Montana, and he is now a professor of ecology at the Institute of Biology at Freie Universität Berlin. Matthias is a member of the Academia Europaea (2022); the German National Academy of Sciences – Leopoldina (2021); a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America (2019); and has received a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (2015).

Natalia Rodríguez Eugenio, a Spanish national living in Rome, is a Land and Water Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and a member of the Secretariat of the Global Soil Partnership. She holds a Master's degree in Sustainable Soil Management and Protection and a PhD in Soil Science. After more than 15 years of work experience in different dimensions of sustainable soil management, Natalia currently coordinates the implementation of activities and projects on soil degradation, soil remediation and governance, provides technical support in the project cycle and is the regional facilitator of the European and Eurasian Soil Partnerships. Before joining FAO, she worked as a soil contamination expert at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, where she published a major report on the State of Soil Contamination in Europe and as a soil expert in QC/QA and GIS where she developed the soil mapping of Ecuador. After publishing a book and several scientific articles on the subject, Natalia was the main author and coordinator of the Global Soil Contamination Assessment report, a FAO flagship publication collectively elaborated by more than 200 experts.

Peter Schad is a senior lecturer at the Chair of Soil Science of the Technical University of Munich (Germany). His scientific interest is the genesis and classification of the soils of the world from the permafrost regions and the deserts to the tropical forests and savannas. He was the chairman of the Working Group World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB) of the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS) from 2010 to 2022. Under his leadership two new editions of the international soil classification system WRB were published: the 3rd edition 2014 and the 4th edition 2022. In 2022, the IUSS awarded him the Guy Smith Medal for ‘life-term outstanding contribution to the development of soil classification’. He is co-author of several scientific books, among them the book ‘Soils of the World’ (2022).

Sandra Spielvogel is a Full Professor for Soil Science (W3), Institute of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition, Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel, since September 2017.
Her research is focused on soil organic matter and nutrient (N, P) cycling, degradation and stabilization, including the linkage between soil structure and soil processes. She is also interested in Microbial SOC and nutrient (N, P) transformations, plant-microorganisms-soil interactions in the rhizo- and detritus sphere, and spatial heterogeneity and variability of soil systems from the molecular to the landscape scale.

Misato Toda is a research associate at the FHNW Institute for Ecopreneurship, working on a project about microplastic (MPs) in agricultural soil. The aim of our project is two-fold. Firstly, we try to establish a new quantification method of MPs in soil using hyperspectral imaging technology and machine learning. It will enable us to detect MPs in soil without pre-treatments, which is an ideal method for large-scale soil monitoring. Secondly, we try to identify the transport mechanisms of microplastic into deep soil layers and potentially, into groundwater resources. This information can be used as input values for future fate models of microplastics in soil environments, and ultimately contributes to drinking water protection against MPs pollution.

Nikolaos Vavlas is an environmental engineer and modeller focusing on nature-based solutions for sustainable agriculture. As a post-doctoral researcher at Wageningen University and research, he works on soil health and the potential of remote sensing. His PhD at Rothamsted Research and Cranfield University (2017-2021) focused on satellite applications in agriculture aiming to provide crop productivity indicators. Since his master's diploma in environmental modelling at UCL (2015), Nikos has aimed to connect models and remote sensing-derived information to enable accurate monitoring of soil health dynamics under a GIS framework.

My role as stakeholder engagement manager is to develop a multi-stakeholder process (MSP) for BENCHMARKS to ensure that we collaborate and partner with stakeholders from the early stage of the project while being guided by diversity, inclusion, equity (DEI), and bottom-up approaches.

Peter Wehrheim is Head of Unit for the “Bioeconomy and Food Systems” within the Directorate General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission in Brussels. Prior to this assignment, he worked for the European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, Phil Hogan. From 2010 to 2018 he was Head of Unit for Land Use and Climate Finance in DG Climate Action. Before 2004, Peter worked at the Universities of Bonn/DE, Maryland/US (with a Heisenberg scholarship of the German Research Foundation) and Kiel/DE. He received his doctoral degree in agricultural economics from the University of Giessen, Germany and comes from a vinery in southern Germany.

Micha Wehrli holds a BSc in Life Sciences with a major in Environmental Technologies, FHNW. Currently, he is studying Environmental Sciences with a major in Ecotoxicology at University of Gothenburg. He is investigating the effects of elevated temperatures on springtails, exposed to the fungicide fluazinam in his master's thesis at University of Aarhus.