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With increasing societal demands for food security and environmental sustainability on land, the question arises: to what extent do synergies and trade‐offs exist between soil functions and how can they be measured across Europe? To address this challenge, we followed the functional land management approach and assessed five soil functions: primary productivity, water regulation and purification, climate regulation, soil biodiversity and nutrient cycling. Soil, management and climate data were collected from 94 sites covering 13 countries, five climatic zones and two land‐use types (arable and grassland). This dataset was analysed using the Soil Navigator, a multicriteria decision support system developed to assess the supply of the five soil functions simultaneously. Most sites scored high for two to three soil functions, demonstrating that managing for multifunctionality in soil is possible but that local constraints and trade‐offs do exist. Nutrient cycling, biodiversity and climate regulation were less frequently delivered at high capacity than the other two soil functions. Using correlation and co‐occurrence analyses, we also found that synergies and trade‐offs between soil functions vary among climatic zones and land‐use types. This study provides a new framework for monitoring soil quality at the European scale where both the supply of soil functions and their interactions are considered.Highlights Managing and monitoring soil multifunctionality across Europe is possible. Synergies and trade‐offs between soil functions exist, making it difficult to maximize the supply of all five soil functions simultaneously. Synergies and trade‐offs between soil functions vary by climatic zone and land‐use type. Climate regulation, biodiversity and nutrient cycling are less frequently delivered at high capacity.

Abstract. Intensive agricultural production can be an important driver for the loss of long-term soil quality. For this reason, the European Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) network adopted four pairs of agricultural CZO sites that differ in their management: conventional or organic. The CZO sites include two pairs of grassland farms in Iceland and two pairs of arable farms in Austria. Conventional fields differed from the organic fields in the use of artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Soils of these eight farms were analysed in terms of their physical, chemical, and biological properties, including soil aggregate size distribution, soil organic matter contents, abundance of soil microbes and soil fauna, and taxonomic diversity of soil microarthropods. In Icelandic grasslands, organically farmed soils had larger mean weight diameters of soil aggregates than the conventional farms, while there were no differences on the Austrian farms. Organic farming did not systematically influence organic matter contents or composition, nor soil carbon and nitrogen contents. Also, soil food web structures, in terms of presence of trophic groups of soil organisms, were highly similar among all farms, indicating a low sensitivity of trophic structure to land use or climate. However, soil organism biomass, especially of bacteria and nematodes, was consistently higher on organic farms than on conventional farms. Within the microarthropods, taxonomic diversity was systematically higher in the organic farms compared to the conventional farms. This difference was found across countries and farm, crop, and soil types. The results do not show systematic differences in physical and chemical properties between organic and conventional farms, but confirm that organic farming can enhance soil biomass and that microarthropod diversity is a sensitive and consistent indicator for land management.