SERENA intends to enhance soil policy effectiveness through the analysis of soil ecosystem services bundles across European agricultural landscapes, i.e. the analysis of a set of soil-based ecosystem services, which are repeatedly appearing together across space and time.

Furthermore, SERENA aims to highlight how soil threats affect the supply of services bundles through adoption of a set of site-specific (i.e. for different pedo-climatic and agricultural systems) thresholds. These have to be scientifically-based and identified with the relevant stakeholders, and their selection must support the identification of areas, which are particularly effective or ineffective in provisioning the desired set of services.

Consequently, the differences among areas in specific pedo-climatic agricultural systems may support the identification of policies and strategies to preserve or improve the joint provision of ecosystem services across landscapes, and limit soil degradation and contrast land consumption.

The SERENA research approach is based on six main pillars:

End-users and stakeholders are at the core of the project: they will collaborate to identify the most important soil threat/SES to be considered in the project, to construct the relevant climate change or land-use, cover and management change scenarios, and  will evaluate the final products of SERENA.

The SERENA partners acknowledge a shared vision on the filiation between soil threats, soil functions, and soil-based ecosystem services and the joint analysis of soil threats and soil-based ecosystem services will help in providing high added-value indicators for both.

SERENA intends to evaluate bundles of soil-based ecosystem services, and will extend the bundle concept to soil threats.

SERENA intends to provide soil threats and soil-based ES evaluation at both the national and European scales, adopting a common methodology (cookbook) to share the indicators to be calculated and the way of evaluating bundles.

SERENA will provide evaluations of soil threats and soil-based ES at the national level under the actual climate, land use and soil management practices.

SERENA recognizes the large experience on the evaluation of soil threats, soil functions and/or soil-based ecosystem services reached in several EU projects