Soil quality – A critical review
By E. Bünemann, Giulia Bongiorno, Z. Bai, R. Creamer, G. B. Deyn, R. Goede, L. Fleskens, Violette Geissen, T. Kuyper, P. Mäder and 4 more. 2018
2,286 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Sampling and analysis or visual examination of soil to assess its status and use potential is widely practiced from plot to national scales. However, the choice of relevant soil attributes and interpretation of measurements are not straightforward, because of the complexity and site-specificity of soils, legacy effects of previous land use, and trade-offs between ecosystem services. Here we review soil quality and related concepts, in terms of definition, assessment approaches, and indicator selection and interpretation. We identify the most frequently used soil quality indicators under agricultural land use. We find that explicit evaluation of soil quality with respect to specific soil threats, soil functions and ecosystem services has rarely been implemented, and few approaches provide clear interpretation schemes of measured indicator values. This limits their adoption by land managers as well as policy. We also consider novel indicators that address currently neglected though important soil properties and processes, and we list the crucial steps in the development of a soil quality assessment procedure that is scientifically sound and supports management and policy decisions that account for the multi-functionality of soil. This requires the involvement of the pertinent actors, stakeholders and end-users to a much larger degree than practiced to date.
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/11bac20ac510f265ecb5e8bd23f3f1632bbeb3e6
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Citations in the corpus
- Soil as a Basis to Create Enabling Conditions for Transitions towards Sustainable Land Management as a Key to Achieve the SDGs by 2030 (2019, background): “The state of the soil functions can be grouped into one term: Soil health, which can be assessed by a variety of indicators [21] and provides a good indication of the soil functions for specific land uses [22].”
- Soil quality indices in a conservation agriculture based rice-mustard cropping system in North-western Indo-Gangetic Plains (2021, unknown): “Bünemann et al. (2018) also reported that soil pH, total organic carbon, available P, parameters related to soil water, available K, total N were the most frequently proposed soil quality indicators.”
- The concept and future prospects of soil health (2020, unknown): “Several other related concepts exist, including soil fertility, soil quality and soil security 6 (Fig.”