Soil quality evaluation and monitoring based on land evaluation

9 pages, 5 tables, 1 figure, 22 references. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Instituto de Recursos Naturales y Agrobiología de Sevilla (IRNAS), Sevilla, Spain.

Soil quality evaluation is the process of predicting the capacity of a soil to function. Due to the many possible soil functions, simple measuring of an individual soil parameter is not sufficient. These soil-quality parameters or indicators are grouped in physical, chemical and biological components. Land evaluation, which tries to predict land behaviour for each particular use, is not the same as soil-quality assessment, basically because the biological parameters of the soil are not considered by land evaluation. However, the process of evaluating soil is not new, and agro-ecological land evaluation has much to offer in this sense. A state-of-the-art review of soil quality evaluation and monitoring is presented in this paper, focusing on the possibilities of applying the accumulated knowledge from past studies of land evaluation. An agro-ecological approach is suggested to facilitate the monumental task of relating the nearly infinite list of soil quality indicators to the numerous soil functions, such as an application of MicroLEIS DSS to soil quality.

This work has been developed as a part of the activities from the ‘SCAPE: Soil Conservation and Protection for Europe’ EU Concerted Action, 2002–2005, funded by the DG-RTD, Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development Programme (Contract EVK2-CT2002-20016; coordinator Prof. A. C. Imeson)

Peer reviewed