Measuring soil sustainability via soil resilience

Area of Science:

• Soil Science
• Multi-omics Research
• Ecosystem Management

Background:

• Sustainable soil management is crucial due to soils' role in water, energy, and food systems.
• Evaluating soil sustainability requires a holistic, cross-disciplinary approach.
• Current methods face challenges in comprehensively assessing soil health and management impacts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify a measurable bioindicator for evaluating soil management sustainability.
• To define soil sustainability through the lens of functional integrity and resilience.
• To propose a novel metric, potential Maximum Ecological Performance (MEPpot), for assessing soil resilience.

Main Methods:

• Cross-disciplinary approach integrating soil science and multi-omics.
• Defining soil sustainability as the maintenance of soil functional integrity.
• Utilizing response diversity of multi-omic markers to calculate MEPpot.

Main Results:

• Resilience is proposed as a bioindicator for soil sustainability, reflecting the soil's ability to recover from disturbances.
• Response diversity, quantified as MEPpot, is identified as the measurable component of soil resilience.
• MEPpot allows for the determination of resistance, resilience thresholds, and potential tipping points.

Conclusions:

• Soil resilience, specifically MEPpot, offers a quantifiable bioindicator for sustainable soil management.
• Understanding ecosystem thresholds is critical for preventing irreversible soil degradation.
• This approach addresses a global challenge in cross-disciplinary soil science and ecosystem assessment.