Tóth, G., L. Montanarella, Gy. Várallyay, T. Tóth, and N. Filippi. 2006. Strengthening optimal food chain element transportby minimizing soil degradation. Recommendations for soil threats identification on different scales in the European Union. Cereal Research Communications. 34: (No.1) 335-338. A proposal for common criteria for delineation of areas in risk of soil degradation has been prepared (JRC-IES 2005). It should be achievable in the further development of the soil thematic strategy to develop a common framework, which attempts to keep the linkage of soil information in EU Member States with pan-European data, and thus provides comparable data, which can be interpreted in a meaningful way not only for the member states, but also for continental-wide Europe. Much efforts still have to be conducted to establish an efficient workflow for updating and maintaining thematic layers with highly detailed information, more particularly in a participatory approach, involving bottom-up transfer of spatial information from local to global level. The new "Multiscale European Soil Information System" (Panagos et al. 2006) should be integrated into more comprehensive/multi-layer monitoring and reporting programmes, for example the Commission's Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe initiative. In this manner the infrastructure and access to soil information transfer can be developed to assist the protection of the multifunctionality of soils (Van-Camp et al. 2004, Várallyay 2003) and contribute to optimal food chain element transport.