WORK IN PROGRESS
The Interdisciplinary Research Unit “Sustainable Management of Soil and Landscape” (SMSL) is a research structure established within the Department of Agricultural Sciences (Dipartimento di Agraria) at the University of Sassari (UNISS), Italy. It brings together researchers from different disciplines to advance the understanding of soil and landscape systems and to promote integrated, scientifically grounded approaches to their sustainable management.
The Unit was established in response to a clear scientific and policy imperative. The European Commission’s Soil Strategy for 2030 sets an ambitious goal: restoring the health condition of European soil ecosystems by 2050, as a foundational contribution to addressing the major environmental and social challenges of our time — from climate neutrality and resilience, to biodiversity conservation, human health protection, and the prevention of land degradation and desertification.
Meeting this challenge requires more than discipline-specific research. It demands what the Strategy itself calls a holistic approach: one that integrates “broad awareness” with “specialist understanding across a wide range of disciplines.” SMSL was built on exactly this principle. Soil is a non-renewable resource that performs essential ecosystem functions — supporting food production, regulating water and nutrient cycles, sustaining biodiversity and habitats, storing carbon, and preserving palaeoenvironmental and archaeological archives. No single discipline can address this complexity alone.
SMSL provides the institutional and intellectual framework to make truly interdisciplinary soil and landscape science possible.