Mycelium; A Living Soil Story: From Bootcamp Challenge to Regenerative Platform

This challenge originated from the collaboration between Alessandro Marchese, who initially proposed an initiative to empower young Europeans to reclaim and regenerate inherited or abandoned land, and Ville Kasurinen
 and Mariana Salgado, whose proposal focused on developing systems for monitoring and measuring soil decarbonization impacts. During the SoilTribes Bootcamp in Porto, these two ideas converged into a shared concept that later became the Mycelium platform vision. This proposal entry has been prepared and published by the Bootcamp facilitation and mentoring team, based on the group’s work during the Bootcamp sessions and the documentation produced throughout the process. The facilitation team for this group was led by olivier Schulbaum and David Leal García, with mentoring support from Maria Rodrigues and Marcio Couto, who accompanied the group’s development and contributed reflections on the evolution of the challenge.

Group 3: Soil Commons & Knowledge Platforms

During the SoilTribes Bootcamp in Porto, two independent proposals evolved into a shared initiative called Mycelium, a platform designed to connect people, knowledge, and data around soil regeneration. The concept proposes enabling many small regenerative actions by local soil stewards while measuring their collective environmental impact. Inspired by the ecological metaphor of fungal mycelium networks, the initiative aims to create a distributed ecosystem of collaboration around land stewardship.

The challenge explores how local soil regeneration initiatives can be connected, supported, and measured collectively. Mycelium proposes a platform where landowners, farmers, citizens, researchers, and institutions can publish soil restoration challenges and collaborate to address them through shared knowledge, labour, and resources. A key aspect of the concept is the ability to measure the environmental impact of many small interventions. Instead of focusing only on large-scale projects, the platform seeks to make visible the cumulative effect of thousands of local regenerative practices. By combining participatory collaboration with scientific data and environmental monitoring, the initiative aims to strengthen soil stewardship as both an ecological and civic practice.

While the platform concept has a transnational scope, its activities focus on local soil regeneration initiatives such as restoring degraded land, supporting small farms, or improving soil resilience in rural and peri-urban areas in Italy. By linking local practices through shared knowledge and data infrastructures, the initiative seeks to create a broader European ecosystem of soil regeneration.

The initiative addresses a wide network of actors connected to land stewardship and soil regeneration. These include farmers, landowners, young people inheriting rural land, environmental entrepreneurs, researchers, municipalities, rural communities, and volunteers interested in ecological restoration. The project particularly aims to support a new generation of soil stewards capable of combining environmental care with collaborative governance of land resources.

Through dialogue during the Bootcamp sessions, the group gradually integrated these perspectives into a single concept. The key insight was to adapt impact measurement frameworks to the scale of small local interventions. Instead of analysing only large restoration projects, the system could evaluate the cumulative effects of multiple regenerative practices carried out by individual land stewards. This shift transformed the challenge into the concept of the Mycelium platform, a collaborative infrastructure designed to connect local soil regeneration initiatives while generating evidence of their collective environmental impact.

The collaboration between the challenge owners played an important role in shaping the project, as the group worked to bridge technological innovation with community-driven land stewardship. One of the most significant conceptual shifts emerged during discussions about how to describe the network of actors involved. The metaphor of mycelium was introduced to represent the invisible ecological networks that connect living systems in soil. This metaphor resonated strongly with the group and became the central narrative of the project, expressing the idea of distributed collaboration across many actors and places.

The governance model envisioned for the Mycelium initiative builds on this collaborative logic. The platform could connect local soil communities with research institutions, municipalities, and civil society organisations. Decision-making and knowledge sharing would rely on open and participatory infrastructures capable of supporting collective stewardship of both soil and data.

During the Bootcamp exercises the group identified several systemic tensions shaping soil regeneration initiatives. These included the gap between scientific data and the lived experience of land stewards, the relationship between local ecological practices and global environmental impact, and the contrast between rapid technological innovation and the slower rhythms of ecological restoration. Recognising these tensions helped the group frame the challenge not only as a technological project but also as a social and cultural process requiring trust, translation of knowledge, and long-term collaboration.

The Bold Vision exercise helped the team articulate a long-term transformation in which soil regeneration becomes a collective social endeavour. In this vision, citizens, scientists, and institutions collaborate through shared infrastructures that allow environmental knowledge and local action to reinforce each other. The Mycelium platform was imagined as a living ecosystem of collaboration capable of linking environmental restoration with democratic participation.

Mapping governance actors revealed a diverse ecosystem of stakeholders involved in soil regeneration. Farmers, municipalities, researchers, environmental organisations, and citizens all play complementary roles in this landscape. The group emphasised the importance of trusted local actors who can connect communities with broader knowledge networks and institutional support.

The Bootcamp also allowed the group to sketch several conceptual prototypes. These included a feature that connects people willing to collaborate on soil regeneration projects, a chatbot providing guidance on regenerative practices based on scientific data, and mechanisms for aggregating and visualising the environmental impact of multiple local interventions. These ideas represent early steps toward defining a minimum viable ecosystem for the platform.

The Mycelium initiative aims to remain actively connected to the broader SoilTribes community through the platform. Sharing progress, inviting collaborators, and documenting lessons learned will allow the project to evolve in dialogue with other challenge groups and participants. This open approach reflects the project’s commitment to collaborative learning and collective experimentation.

The Bootcamp process produced several important outputs that helped shape the project’s identity and direction. These include the narrative concept of the Mycelium platform, visual storytelling elements communicating the idea of distributed soil stewardship, initial sketches of the platform architecture, and early concepts for tools supporting regenerative practices and environmental impact measurement. Together these outputs provide a foundation for further experimentation and development.

🪴 Awareness & Communication Tools: podcasts, videos, campaigns, infographics

Following the Bootcamp, the group identified several priorities for advancing the initiative. These include clarifying the organisational structure of the project, developing a minimal prototype of the platform, building partnerships with research infrastructures working on soil and climate data, and testing the concept through pilot soil regeneration projects. Strengthening communication strategies will also be essential to engage new collaborators and stakeholders.

Further development of the Mycelium initiative would benefit from technical support for building the first platform prototype, partnerships with research organisations working on soil monitoring and climate data, and collaboration with municipalities interested in participatory land restoration. Access to networks of farmers and land stewards would allow the concept to be tested in real contexts. Additional funding and mentorship could help refine the platform’s governance, technological design, and long-term sustainability.