This year we again visited three farmers for our transdisciplinary assessment of soil compaction in their fields.

After last year's Corona pandemic threw a spanner in the works, this year we were able to conduct soil sampling in April under the best conditions. As a result, we found well-moistened soils that allowed us to cleanly take soil samples and make penetrologger measurements. For the first time, we conducted the associated interviews online, which took some getting used to for all involved, but worked out well thanks to the flexibility of our farmers. The respective manual harvests have also been completed, so that we now have a total of 9 case studies, with three more planned for next year before the final evaluation.

We would like to thank all participating farmers and wish them a successful year 2021.

Due to the pandemic situation, the Eurosoil Congress of the ECSSS (European Confederation of Soil Science Societies), which was actually planned for 2020, was held this year in August in an online format. The theme of the conference was "Connecting people and soil" and the program was structured around selected Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (https://sdgs.un.org/goals). In our thematic areas, these were, for example, SDG 4: Education and awareness, SDG 6: Clean water and sanitation, or SDG 15: Life on land.

The SOILAssist team was represented with numerous contributions and was thus able to present issues and results of the project to an international audience.

In a presentation by Augustin et al. within the session "SDG 6 & 15 - Physical soil protection" the quantified transport intensities (using the model FiTraM) for a crop rotation in northern Germany were presented. It was possible to show where and when high loads occurred in the field in form of frequent wheel passes and high wheel loads. Another presentation by Lorenz et al. in the same session highlighted how dynamic wheel loads and contact area pressures affect soils and change their structures. The results were based on extensive, sensor-based field tests with wheel passes by various agricultural vehicles. Modeling (SaSCiA model) of soil compaction risk at the regional scale was addressed in a poster by Kuhwald et al. (SDG 6 & 15 - Physical soil protection). The results highlighted that soil compaction risk is highly dynamic spatially and temporally within crop rotations. In addition, a poster contribution (Ledermüller & Jacobs, SDG 6 & 15 - Physical soil protection) presented the economic evaluation of soil compaction and prevention measures with the use of a farm model (FarmBoss model). A third poster (Prilop & Jacobs, SDG 4: Soil science skills for the future) picked up results of an online survey at German universities on the extent to which soil compaction and measures to avoid it are topics in agricultural courses.

In the first phase of the project, we conducted an online survey among farmers on the topic of soil compaction. After the project-internal analyses were published (doi: 10.3390/agronomy11050969), the complete data set is now available via the following link in the BonaRes data portal: https://doi.org/10.20387/bonares-k85p-tr5n.

The following topics were queried:

• General farm information
• Perception of and measures to avoid soil compaction
• Crop rotation and tillage
• Mechanization and farm organization
• Consulting and information services.

We look forward to a lively use of the collected data.