So what is the significance of living laboratories?
The farmers, land managers, and citizens jointly design solutions rather than researchers dictating what to do and measuring the consequences. It is not that research questions depend on what is going on in the real operation, but rather on practical challenges. These are at the territorial level, covering hundreds to thousands of hectares, where management-level decisions have a real economic impact. Mission Soil aims to reach 100 living labs by 2030, since laboratory-elegant solutions that do not survive this test on a real-world scale will never scale, no matter how scientifically meritorious they are.

Why should Mission Soil view soil health as an emergency infrastructure?
Sixty percent of soils in the EU are functionally degraded – compacted, eroded, devoid of organic matter. This is not some fanciful environmentalism; healthy soils manage water, capture carbon, recycle nutrients, nourish crops, filter pollutants, and sustain biodiversity. Poor soils exacerbate floods, demand artificial inputs, unleash previously locked-up carbon, and fail to deliver ecosystem services in the tune of billions of dollars every year. There are pressures of unsustainable agriculture, deforestation, contamination, and climate change. Mission Soil links soil functionality to food security, climatic resilience, water quality, and biodiversity, and, in fact, to each Green Deal goal.

What are the tangible deliverables that living lab proposals have to provide?
-Improved understanding of soil-reliant organisms needs to be done in terms of population dynamics, habitat needs, and management interactions – especially in the case of ground-nesting pollinators.
-Determining the causes of decline involves isolating specific threats: pesticide pathways, mechanical disturbance, resource scarcity, microclimate changes, and, most importantly, synergistic effects in which stressors interact.
-Mitigation measures require interventions with proven reversibility of declines, such as refuge design, altered tillage, pesticide-free buffers, nesting substrate, etc. These require incorporating entomology, soil biology, agronomy, and landscape ecology, but economic viability limits feasibility.

What can microfluidics do to overcome the bottlenecks in the soil research of the living labs?
Microfluidics addresses the analytical constraints that limit the throughput of the living lab. Microbial interaction Soil-on-chip platforms provide controlled microscale ecosystems that simulate soil structure and chemical gradients, facilitating systematized studies of microbial interactions that are unfeasible in the heterogeneous field soils. Droplet encapsulation speeds up high-throughput microbiome screening -beneficial strains are associated with indicators of health. Enzymatic activity or nutrient cycling across spatial and temporal gradients is done by automated dispensing and sequential injection of hundreds of soil extracts. The identification of fungi enables rapid tracking of the pathogen or characterization of mycorrhizal associations. The capabilities span field observation and mechanisms that were previously impractical.

Which types of calls that are relevant at Mission Soil can be verified using microfluidics?
The HORIZON-MISS-2024-SOIL-01-05 on the health of soil, pollinators, and ecosystem functions will need to know how management influences ground-nesting insects. Microfluidic analysis of chemical residues, microbial communities, and their impact on larval nutrition, or environmental DNA detection, is ground-breaking. The soil-on-chip and high-throughput screening enable the type of functional characterization needed by the HORIZON-MISS-2024-SOIL-01-06 on harnessing soil biodiversity to cropping systems: Characterising plant-microbe interactions, especially mycorrhizal networks and rhizosphere bacteria, to promote nutrient uptake or disease resistance. Both are focused on living lab validation, in which fast, cost-effective analytics are used to define a feasible sampling intensity.

Which consortium composition works with living labs?
Four competencies are scarcely found in individual institutions. The disciplinary richness of soil science, ecology, and microbiology, and the methodological rigor, are offered by academic partners. Agricultural organizations can bring operational skills, access to land, and, most importantly, practitioner credibility, which defines the living lab’s feasibility. Technology SMEs create field-deployable analysis tools to convert research specifications into practice in a system. Coordination bodies, such as NGOs, extension services, and regional agencies, assist in coordinating stakeholder work to make sure that co-design is not performative. Five or eight partners are sufficient; beyond that, the overheads tend to increase, making risk coordination more difficult. Clustering by geography is important: virtual teams require physical proximity so members can interact in person rather than just through email.

What is the strategic difference between lighthouse and living labs locations?
Living labs are places for innovation development where practices are experimented with, refined, and adapted through the iterative engagement of stakeholders. Lighthouses serve as demonstration sites for proven practices to be adopted. The difference influences proposal development. Living labs are focused on experimentation, co-design, adaptive management, openness to failure documentation – they are research locations with stakeholder integration. Lighthouses concentrate on communication, training, farmer-to-farmer learning, and dialogue between policy and policy extension services, with research support. Most of the calls finance living laboratories that are projected to cover the role of lighthouses after the practices become stable. Explain your position in this continuum regarding your proposal; how you will record repeatable knowledge.

What to do concerning the tension between rigor and pragmatism?
Such tension is useful when it is not hidden. Science requires rigorous comparisons, replication, and standardization, which are incompatible with the limitations of farmers, aversion to risk, and site optima. Powerful propositions formulate hybrid strategies, reserve sections for systematic experimentation with researcher-controlled protocols to provide publishable mechanistic information, and are devoted to practitioner-led adaptive management, in which interventions are based on discussion and success is measured by readiness rather than statistical significance for adoption. Apply analytical skills to obtain as much information as possible from both; detailed characterization makes up for experimental control. The very process of document negotiation is critical for understanding what prevents optimal practices from being implemented at scale.

Which exploitation channels do living lab outcomes have?
The outcomes of a living lab do not commercialise in the same way as those of traditional research. Exploitation emphasizes the adoption of practices, political impact, and the dissemination of decision support rather than patents. Good channels are shared management instructions with practitioner organizations that guarantee operational reality. Based on the data from the living lab, digital tools such as soil health apps, biodiversity protocols, and optimization models are developed. Training activities that transform tacit knowledge into protocols that can be transferred. Policy briefs that transform the results into regulatory advice or subsidy changes. To technology partners, exploitation means productizing analytical approaches into commercial products or services for the soil health-monitoring market. Credibility is enhanced when there are letters to the cooperatives, authorities, or extension services with adoption intentions.

What are the most consistent sources of mistakes that corrosively affect the competitiveness of living laboratories?
Viewing stakeholders as sources of data rather than co-designers-evaluators reveals the performative participation. Suggesting large magnitudes or stakeholder diversity that the budget cannot support. Scientific plans involving experimental control that cannot be achieved in the working operation. Lacking integration: parallel agricultural and ecological work packages that never have meaningful interactions. Under-allocating analytical needs – soil health monitoring, biodiversity assessment, and economic evaluation at living lab scales, all demand large sampling budgets that have to be reduced to achieve visible activities. Generalized exploitation other than generic dissemination- demonstrate selective adoption processes, involvement in policy, scaling channels. Without an explanation of complementarity, it ignores existing living labs. These are to be dealt with systematically, and you are competitive.