Summary: | Soil is the most important natural resource for life on Earth after water. Given its
fundamental role in sustaining the human population, both the availability and
quality of soil must be managed sustainably and protected. To ensure sustainable
management we need to understand the intrinsic functional capacity of different soils
across Europe and how it changes over time. Soil monitoring is needed to support
evidence-based policies to incentivise sustainable soil management. To this aim, we
assessed which soil attributes can be used as potential indicators of five soil
functions; (1) primary production, (2) water purification and regulation, (3) carbon
sequestration and climate regulation, (4) soil biodiversity and habitat provisioning
and (5) recycling of nutrients. We compared this list of attributes to existing
national (regional) and EU-wide soil monitoring networks. The overall picture
highlighted a clearly unbalanced dataset, in which predominantly chemical soil
parameters were included, and soil biological and physical attributes were severely
under represented. Methods applied across countries for indicators also varied. At a
European scale, the LUCAS-soil survey was evaluated and again confirmed a lack of
important soil biological parameters, such as C mineralisation rate, microbial
biomass and earthworm community, and soil physical measures such as bulk density. In
summary, no current national or European monitoring system exists which has the
capacity to quantify the five soil functions and therefore evaluate multi-functional
capacity of a soil and in many countries no data exists at all. This paper calls for
the addition of soil biological and some physical parameters within the LUCAS-soil
survey at European scale and for further development of national soil monitoring
schemes.
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