The environment is changing quickly and it is ever more burdened in connection with the greater needs of human society. This fact has increased efforts to improve the management of land and natural resources and the necessity to evaluate them. Land valuations become more important as the land consumption increases. Soil needs to be evaluated in the whole context of how its quality is affected and the values it provides. The concept of ecosystem services offers this holistic view. This paper defines ecosystem services (ES), the various linkages between soil properties, their functions and benefits, the assessment of soil quality using indicators and then briefly mentions EU environmental assessment methods and terms used in the context of ES. The article also mentions frameworks with which to assess and evaluate the soil quality that can be divided into two groups. The first group is comprised of a framework of indicators that describe the current state of the soil system assessment for evaluating the quality of the agricultural land. This is based on a detailed measurement of the terrain, a statistical analysis of soil databases or processing the status of specific threats to the soil. The second group is comprised of a framework of indicators focused on changes in the soil quality and applied soil management. These frameworks deal with the productivity of the soil in various systems of farming, compare agricultural systems or discuss the advantages of soil biota as indicators of soil quality in detail. Many of the designs of the soil quality indicators focus on the soil management in the context of a single discipline such as agriculture or water pollution. There are concepts for considering the soil quality in regional planning.

Currently, we can see a rapid decline of agricultural land with new uses, especially for construction purposes. This negative trend is evident across Europe, the Czech Republic has the fastest loss of land in the EU. One reason for the significant loss of agricultural land is building industrial zones, which utilises of greenfield areas, and their occupying new areas of agricultural land, often the most the most fertile. The analysis deals with the occupied area (the area of a particular industrial zone), the percentage utilisation of that industrial zone, the number of employees in the industrial zone, and the land quality expressed by means of the agricultural land protection class. The results of the analysis show the low usability of industrial zones, the large occupation of the agricultural land, and the low benefits to the Czech state and Czech citizens. The results also show the poor land use policy in relation to the soil protection. This work is followed by the project Sustainable management of natural resources with an emphasis on non-production and production ability of the soil, the results of which will be included in legislation and be binding for spatial planning.