The Soil Experts project, aimed at training specialists in assessing the condition of soils damaged due to combat actions, has been launched by a partnership including the Sumy National Agrarian University, the Royal Agricultural University in the UK, the University of Cambridge (UK), and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

The program targets former military personnel with education and experience in agriculture, geoinformation systems, environmental protection, and cartography.

Invited by the rectorate of SNAU, Dr. Maxym Solokha, Head of the Laboratory of Instrumental Methods of Soil Research, Standardization, and Metrology at the O.N. Sokolovskyi Research Center for Ground and Agroecology Sciences, delivered a lecture to the future soil experts. His presentation, "Methodological Approaches to Assessing the Impact of Combat Actions on Ukraine's Soil Cover," covered the visualization and description of various impacts of war on soil, their consequences, and soil reclamation directions. Participants were introduced to the results of chemical analyses of original soil samples from conflict zones and methodological approaches to identifying types of combat actions based on remote information.

Additional scientific lectures were presented by laboratory staff, including Kateryna Sementsova (The Impact of Combat Actions on the Content of Metal Trace Elements in Soil, Methods for Studying Mobile Forms of Trace Elements, and Ensuring the Accuracy and Reliability of Measurements by Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry) and Nadiia Vynokurova (Aspects of Determining Soil Granulometric Composition under Anthropogenic Stress).