State of Knowledge of Soil Biodiversity – Status, Challenges and Potentialities, Report 2020

Our well-being and the livelihoods of human societies are highly dependent on biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides. It is essential that we understand these links and the consequences of biodiversity loss for the various global challenges we currently face, including food insecurity and malnutrition, climate change, poverty and diseases. The Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development sets out a transformative approach to achieve socio-economic development while conserving the environment. There is increasing attention on the importance of biodiversity for food security and nutrition, especially above-ground biodiversity such as plants and animals. However, less attention is being paid to the biodiversity beneath our feet, soil biodiversity. Yet, the rich diversity of soil organisms drives many processes that produce food, regenerate soil or purify water. In 2002, the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) decided at its 6th meeting to establish an International Initiative for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Soil Biodiversity and since then, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been facilitating this initiative. In 2012, FAO members established the Global Soil Partnership to promote sustainable soil management and increase attention to this hidden resource. The Status of the World’s Soil Resources (FAO, 2015) concluded that the loss of soil biodiversity is considered one of the main global threats to soils in many regions of the world. The 14th Conference of the Parties invited FAO, in collaboration with other organizations, to consider the preparation of a report on the state of knowledge on soil biodiversity covering its current status, challenges and potentialities. This report is the result of an inclusive process involving 300 scientists from around the world under the auspices of the FAO’s Global Soil Partnership and its Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative and the European Commission. The report presents the state of knowledge on soil biodiversity, the threats to it, the solutions that soil biodiversity can provide to problems in different fields, including agriculture, environmental conservation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, nutrition, medicine and pharmaceuticals, remediation of polluted sites, and many others. The report will make a valuable contribution to raising awareness of the importance of soil biodiversity and highlighting its role in finding solutions to today’s global threats; it is a cross-cutting topic at the heart of the alignment of several international policy frameworks, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and multilateral environmental agreements. Furthermore, soil biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides will be critical to the success of the recently declared UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030) and the upcoming Post- 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Soil biodiversity could constitute, if an enabling environment is built, a real nature-based solution to most of the problems humanity is facing today, from the field to the global scale. Therefore efforts to conserve and protect biodiversity should include the vast array of soil organisms that make up more than 25% of the total biodiversity of our planet

Soil health cluster analysis based on national monitoring of soil indicators

A major challenge in soil science is to monitor and understand the state and change of soils at a national scale to inform decision making and policy. To address this, there is a need to identify key parameters for soil health and function and determine how they relate to other parameters, including traditional soil surveys. Here we present a national‐scale dataset of topsoil sampled as part of a wider agri‐environment monitoring scheme in Wales, UK. Over 1,350 topsoils (0–15 cm) were sampled across a very wide range of habitats and a range of physical, chemical and biological soil quality indicators were measured. We show consistent differences in soil physicochemical properties across habitat types, with carbon decreasing and pH increasing across the habitat productivity gradient from bogs through woodlands and grasslands to arable systems. The soils within our dataset are largely within the limits identified as important for supporting habitat function, with the exception of excessive phosphate levels in mesotrophic grassland. Cluster detection methods identified four soil functional classes based on measured topsoil properties, which were more related to habitat type than the genesis‐based soil classification from soil maps. These soil functional classes can be interpreted as phenoforms within the soil genoforms found by traditional soil classification. This shows the importance of land‐use management in determining the soil health and functional capacity of soils. Our work provides an account of the current state of soil health in Wales, its relationship to soil function and a baseline for future monitoring to track changes against agri‐environment and other policy targets