Un cadre conceptuel pour l’évaluation des fonctions des sols : vers une base commune revue bibliographique et cas d’application

Master

English. The increasing pressure of humans on soils affects their ability to provide key functions and deliver ecosystem services. In the last decades, many methods and tools have been developed to quantify these functions and evaluate soils, aiming at providing guidance to land users and policy makers for the sustainable management of soil resources. These methods and tools, however, have been developed independently using different conceptual frameworks such as soil health or soil quality, which in turn evolved over time. This currently results in a diversity of available terminology and definitions to represent the objectives of evaluation and the evaluated aspects of soil. For actors interested in soil evaluation, this diversity is a source of confusion. In this paper, we reviewed the available soil evaluation methods with a focus on the methodologies for soil function assessment to understand what was the quantified aspect of soil. We found that i) the evaluated soil under study was not the same in all publications, that ii) the structure of quantification methodologies is in most cases similar with a scoring of soil properties and an aggregation of scores, and that iii) we lacked the vocabulary and concepts to precisely describe the aspects evaluated with these methods. We developed a conceptual framework to define concepts onevaluated aspects of soil and link them with soil functioning and user needs. These concepts are soil capacities, potentials, and function supply. The framework is retroactively tested on the publications found during the literature review. Beyond the need for an unified and operational definition of soil function assessment, we opened up a discussion on the fundamentals of monitoring functions in relation to a sustainable use of the soil resources.