Monitoring soil health in Scotland by land use category - a scoping study
The strategic relevance of 13 potential indicators to monitoring soil health in the context of existing land use
- December 01, 2021
This scoping study takes 13 potential soil health indicators identified in a 2020 report for CXC and considers their strategic relevance to monitoring soil health in the context of existing land use Scotland.
Key points
- Potential primary soil health indicators were identified for several land use categories.
- It is not possible to identify a single, definitive indicator for each individual land use category
- Seven indicators were considered extremely important for more than 50% of the categories assessed:
- soil organic matter content
- topsoil depth
- erosion features
- bulk density
- bacteria and archaeal diversity (DNA methods)
- fungal and nematode diversity (DNA methods)
The issue of dependency between indicators generates a layer of complexity that requires further exploration.
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