Peatlands are crucial in climate change resilience as critical habitats for biodiversity, ecosystem services, and Carbon storage. Today, 50% of the EU peatland area is degraded due to peat extraction, with a high environmental impact associated and poses a high risk for the Green Transition goals. The horticultural industry depends entirely on peat for growing media, as current alternatives face technical, socio-cultural, and economic barriers. PEATLESS aims to contribute to overcoming these barriers to promote the uptake of sustainable and locally available substrates blends with reduced peat content in selected horticultural systems: mushrooms, seedlings and ornamental. These blends will be designed through co-creation and will be tailored to sectorial needs. The performance of these alternative media will be demonstrated and showed to growers at commercial facilities across 4 key regions for horticulture. To demonstrate performance and support decision-making, a digital sensoring system for results monitoring will be developed. To overcome socio-cultural barriers, social innovation, educational and innovative dissemination activities will boost knowledge exchange to raise growers’ confidence in alternatives to peat. To overcome economic barriers, an integral feasibility assessment will be developed (e.g., LCSA) followed by new business and organisational models’ creation. Furthermore, an upscaling plan to replicate the PEATLESS approach at national and European levels will ensure project continuation. This 3-year project involves 12 partners from 4 countries, including RTOs, universities, industry, end-users’ representatives and decision-makers, following a multi-actor approach. By 2050, significant long-term impact is expected, predominantly: 1) Environmental: 2.5m m3 of peat saved with a reduction of 900k t CO2eq); 2) Socio-economic: 5,000 horticultural business with PEATLESS substrates across 40 regions; 3) Policy: +30 recommendations.

Nitrogen (N) is a vital nutrient for plant growth. However, the intensive use of N fertilizers in agriculture, whereby only 30-50% of applied N is taken up by crops, has led to significant environmental challenges. Impactful losses occur through nitrate leaching to the groundwater, leading to its contamination, and through nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, a long-lasting greenhouse gas. Acknowledging the need for a coordinated effort among the four helixes of innovation (i.e. research, society, industry and policy) to unlock the necessary efforts for monitoring N fluxes and action towards reducing N losses and increasing N use efficiency, NitroScope has two major ambitions: a) improving scientific knowledge for pedo-climatic regions getting both simple region-specific emissions factors and model-based decision support and b) bringing the knowledge to land managers so that mitigation will happen. To achieve this, NitroScope will improve N flux monitoring through 125 sites spread over at least 10 pedo-climatic regions using improved proximal sensors for high throughput continuous nitrate quantification, remote sensing, and better methodology to adequately account for the variability of in-the-field N2O emissions. The data will be gathered in a database hosted on a cloud to facilitate reporting and will be used to determine region-specific emission factors and provide model-based decision support with reduced uncertainties. Based on this, improved N management and conservation solutions will be assessed, including variable rate N fertilization and crop residue management. NitroScope will further use transdisciplinary methodology, including developing 2 farm management add-ons, to inform and engage land managers to actively contribute to monitoring and managing N fluxes in Europe while improving agricultural yield and quality. Finally, this will result in a more precise EU N budget estimation and future scenarios to support decision-making.