Soil Quality Assessment under Different Land Use Types: A Tool for Supporting Soil Management

Dear Colleagues,

Soil is the most basic and yet most complex component of terrestrial ecosystems. It regulates most of the ecosystem processes and hosts a large part of the earth's biodiversity, providing the physical basis for many human activities. Healthy and productive soils underpin the long-term sustainability of ecosystems and provide key ecosystem services needed for human well-being. Land use could directly affect the main soil ecosystem services and consequently compromise their functioning. Intensification and competing uses of soil for cropping, pasture, forestry and urbanization are increasingly affecting the provisioning, regulating and supporting ecosystem services (e.g., food, fibre, wood, nutrient cycling, climate regulation, water filtration and purification), threatening the health and the quality of soils worldwide. Thus, maintaining and/or restoring soil quality and health should become a key task for land management planning and policies. The assessment of soil quality is based on the study of soil physical, chemical, and biological soil properties and the processes related to the ability of the soil to function effectively as a component of a healthy ecosystem. The choice of these properties can be complex and varies among different land uses and management systems, also differing on spatial and temporal scales. In this sense, soil quality assessment is a proxy for suggesting sustainable management of soil resources. Within this special issue, we welcome the submission of all types of contributions (original research, reviews, and meta-analyses) providing state-of-the-art and new insights to assess soil quality and soil health across a wide range of land uses and land management systems. More specifically, we are interested in studies investigating the direct impact of broad land uses on soil quality as evaluated by field trials, as well as contributions focusing on geostatistical, remote sensing, modeling methods and multivariate approaches.

Contributions may include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

1. Soil quality assessment and monitoring
2. Advanced approaches for soil quality evaluation
3. New insights into minimum data-sets and indexing approaches
4. Geostatistical, remote sensing, molecular biology and soil imaging approaches for soil quality monitoring
5. Impact of different land use types on soil quality
6. Land use changes effects on soil quality
7. Assessment of soil quality under different soil management systems

Dr. Rossana Marzaioli
Dr. Gaurav Mishra
Guest Editors

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