Agricultural long-term field experiments (LTFEs) are an important basis for soil and agricultural sciences. A compilation of metadata and research data from LTFEs in Germany shall enhance networking and simplify the access to this most valuable research infrastructure. The common analyses of similar LTFEs on different sites can broaden the results. Therefore, LTFEs were classified and their distribution in Germany was compared to three site classifications.

In a world of increasing pressure on our environment, large-scale knowledge about our soil resources is in high demand. We show how five decades of collaboration between EU member states resulted in a full-coverage soil profile analytical database for Europe (SPADE), with soil data provided by soil experts from each country. We show how the dataset can be applied to estimate soil organic carbon in Europe and suggest further improvement to this critical support tool in continental-scale policies.

Policy to conserve thinning arable soils relies on a balance between the rates of soil erosion and soil formation. Our knowledge of the latter is meagre. Here, we present soil formation rates for an arable hillslope, the first of their kind globally, and a woodland hillslope, the first of their kind in Europe. Rates range between 26 and 96 mm kyr⁻¹. On the arable site, erosion rates are 2 orders of magnitude greater, and in a worst-case scenario, bedrock exposure could occur in 212 years.

The need for biomass for energetic or material use is increasing parallel to the need to extend the production of food for a growing world population. This results in conflicts between both land use strategies. Use of marginal lands could solve this conflict, however, the understanding of marginal lands and the knowledge of their potentials are still not fully developed. We present an approach to assess land marginality based on soil quality and an estimation of land potentials all over Europe.

The study refers to a survey of the attributes of the main soil classes of the state of Pará, an eastern Amazon region in Brazil. These soils have good potential for agricultural use under natural conditions. In this study we observed that the soils are predominantly kaolinitic, but have relatively low aluminum and organic matter contents, with huge textural variability. The results enable a better understanding of eastern Amazonian soils, whose area reaches more than 1.2 million km².