Soil biology, soil health and ecosystem services: an overview

Summary

Soil health refers to the ability of soil, at a specified point in time, to function as a dynamic living system within natural or managed ecosystems. A healthy soil sustains plant, fungal, and animal productivity and health, maintains or enhances water and air quality, and delivers essential ecosystem services over the long term, without increasing trade-offs between ecosystem services (Van den Elsen, et al., 2022). The term is often used interchangeably with soil quality (Bünemann et al., 2018). Soils support a range of ecosystem services and theyprovide benefits to human societies (Calvaruso et al., 2021) through the delivery of soil functions. Soil functions commonly considered in soil health assessments from an agricultural context are primary productivity and biomass production, climate regulation, water regulation and purification, nutrient cycling and habitat provision for biodiversity (Haygarth & Ritz, 2009; Schulte et al., 2014, Pereira, 2018). Additional functions, such as pest and disease management (Creamer et al., 2022) and pollutant degradation (Vogel et al., 2018) have also been proposed in the literature. Monitoring of soil health aims to assess the resilience of soil to provide continued support in the provision of ecosystem services.