Quantitative Evaluation of Soil Functions: Potential and State

Abstract

Soils play a key role for the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Thus, soils are essential for human society not only because they form the basis for the production of food. This has long been recognized, and during the last three decades the need to establish methods to evaluate the ability of soils to provide soil functions has moved toward the top of the agenda in soil science. Quantitative evaluation schemes are indispensable to adequately include soils into strategies to reach sustainable development targets. In this paper we build upon existing approaches and propose a concept to evaluate individual soil functions with respect to the soil's intrinsic potential in contrast to its actual state. This leads to a separation of indicator variables and allows for conclusions on the structure of appropriate models that are required to predict the dynamics of soil functions in response to external perturbation. This concept is demonstrated for the production function, carbon storage and water storage which are evaluated exemplarily for different plots of a long-term field experiment. It is discussed for nutrient cycling and habitat function, where evaluation schemes are still less obvious.

Managing Soils for Recovering from the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…From a functional perspective, resilient soil addresses basic soil functions such as biomass production, including agriculture and forestry, and storing, filtering, and transforming nutrients, substances, and water [19]. These functions and services enable soils to support the basic supply of food and natural products required by human population even under high external pressure and has moved the importance of soil functions higher on the agenda in soil science research [20] as well as in a policy setting.…”

Long-term field experiments in Germany: classification and spatial representation

“…LTFEs are further important for research related to questions regarding the interannual variability of crop yield (i.e., yield stability) that can be associated with climate change (Berti et al, 2016;Reckling et al, 2018;Macholdt et al, 2019a) and respective adaptation options (Hamidov et al, 2018). Valuable data can also be delivered for the validation of models (Franko et al, 2011;Ellerbrock et al, 2005) and for concepts used to evaluate soil functions (Vogel et al, 2019;Techen et al, 2020).…”

A Framework to Consider Soil Ecosystem Services in Territorial Planning

“…Thus, agricultural soils need to be addressed specifically as a critical resource and integrated in decision-support tools for sustainable planning strategies, as emphasized by Robinson et al (2013) and McBratney et al (2014). Despite the recognition of soil management in agroecosystems as a powerful mechanism for addressing environmental challenges (Robertson et al, 2014;Schulte et al, 2014;Ruhl, 2016), few studies have focussed specifically on soil-centered assessment of ES within agroecosystems (Greiner et al, 2017;Vogel et al, 2019) or even in other ecosystems (Dominati et al, 2010;Breure et al, 2012;Bouma, 2014;Grêt-Regamey et al, 2017). Recent publications on soil ES (Dominati et al, 2014;Adhikari and Hartemink, 2016;Birgé et al, 2016;Jónsson and Davíðsdóttir, 2016) highlight the need to develop an assessment framework for soils to be integrated in ES assessment studies.…”