Resilient Soils Living Lab Using LLcloud for Multi-Sensor Soil Health Monitoring and Analysis

Healthy soil is the foundation of life on Earth!​ It fuels our food systems, filters our water, supports rich biodiversity, and strengthens our resilience to climate change. Soil also preserves cultural heritage, shapes our landscapes, and underpins economies around the world. Protecting soils and making them more resilient means securing our future.

In early 2025, the leading Forest Research Institute in Bulgaria, joined forces with National Soil Survey – a company with unparalleled soil analysis and mapping expertise in the country, and Digital Spaces Living Lab – one of the leading and most experienced Living Labs in Europe, to create ReSoiLL – a new Resilient Soils Living Lab to study and pilot new sensors, technologies and best practices for creating more resilient soils in Living Lab trials in forest, urban and industrial areas in Bulgaria, the Balkans, Europe, and beyond.

What makes this new initiative truly unique, is the opportunities Bulgaria provides as a natural test bed for soil innovation. The country hosts some of the longest-running ecological monitoring stations in Europe, including Parangalitsa (since 1968), Beklemeto (since 1972), Gabra and Sandanski (both since 1980 for afforestation against erosion). These sites jointly provide over 60 years of continuous data on soil, climate, and aboveground vegetation – an unparalleled legacy that allows new technologies to be linked to robust long-term datasets, ensuring reliable validation and benchmarking. At the same time, Bulgaria still lacks a dedicated pilot initiative for testing soil resilience solutions across its diverse ecosystems – spanning forests, agricultural lands, urban environments, and post-industrial areas, making ReSoiLL a pioneering effort with broad applicability.

The new ReSoiLL Living Lab also opens the door to integrating advanced robotics systems (such as SPOT robots) already used in ecological surveys, enabling automated field data collection, soil sampling, and in-situ analysis. Combined with multi-sensor data platforms like LLcloud and the development of digital twins of ecosystems, these innovations will allow researchers and practitioners to simulate, monitor, and predict soil dynamics under changing environmental and management conditions, providing a unique environment for demonstrating and refining next-generation technologies under real-world conditions.