HORIZON-MISS-2025-05-SOIL-11 — Soil Salinity in Europe: Drivers, indicators, current levels and temporal changes

Transitional land–water interfaces and mosaic agricultural landscapes provide vital ecosystem services and societal benefits but face
increasing pressures from biodiversity loss, climate change, and land degradation. Climate-driven soil and water salinisation is a major
environmental stressor, generating substantial ecological, social, and economic costs while exposing gaps in fragmented scientific,
governance, and management frameworks. Current responses to salt-affected landscapes remain largely single-disciplinary and
short-term, leaving these high-value interfaces as blind spots in research and policy. TRESURE-Labs addresses this challenge by
advancing a transdisciplinary collaboration that restores ecosystem services while delivering lasting societal benefits. The objective of
TREASURE-Labs is to co-develop, implement, and assess locally adapted ecosystem restoration solutions for transitional interfaces
and mosaic agricultural landscapes threatened by salinity across three transboundary Living Labs (LLs). The LLs span inland, coastal,
and island saline systems across 11 EU Member States and Associated Countries, including low-lying deltas, inland salty marshes, and
salinisation-prone agricultural mosaics. Using an integrated transdisciplinary framework, the project co-designs, implements, and
evaluates site-specific restoration packages. Robust monitoring aligned with EU environmental policies, including the Nature
Restoration Regulation, ensures restoration effectiveness and non-deterioration. TRESURE-Labs delivers scalable solutions and
practical guidance for practitioners and policymakers, demonstrating how restoration enhances biodiversity, climate resilience, and
sustainable land–water use. TREASURE-Labs establishes four pathways from local experimentation to practice, evidence to policy,
restoration to a nature-positive economy, and inclusive co-creation to societal resilience, enabling ecological, economic, and societal
impact in saline landscapes.