An Open Soil Health Assessment Framework Facilitating Sustainable Soil Management

The crucial role of healthy soil in achieving sustainable food production and environment is increasingly recognized, as is the importance of proper assessment of soil quality. We introduce a new framework, open soil index (OSI), which integrally evaluates soil health of agricultural fields and provides recommendation for farming practices. The OSI is an open-source modular framework in which soil properties, functions, indicators and scores, and management advice are linked hierarchically. Soil health is evaluated with respect to sustainable crop production but can be extended to other ecosystem functions. The OSI leverages the existing knowledge base of agronomic research and routine laboratory data, enabling its application with limited cost. The OSI is a generic framework that can be adopted for specific regions with specific objectives. As a proof of concept, the OSI is implemented for all (>700,000) Dutch agricultural fields and illustrated with 11 pairs (“good” and “poor”) of local fields and 32 fields where soil quality and crop yield have been monitored. The OSI produced reasonable evaluation for most pairs when soil physical functions were refined with on-site soil visual assessment. The soil functions are sufficiently independent and yet together reflect complex multidimensionality of soil quality. The framework can facilitate designing sustainable soil management programs by bridging regional targets to field-level actions

Organic farming practices result in compositional shifts in nematode communities that exceed crop-related changes

Intensification of conventional agriculture has resulted in a decline of soil ecosystem functioning. Organic agriculture intends to manage soil biota in a manner that is more geared towards adequate cycling of nutrients with minimal losses. Ecological interpretation of agricultural practices-induced shifts in primary decomposers, bacteria and fungi, is non-trivial due to their enormous biodiversity. Bacterivorous and fungivorous nematodes feed selectively on these microorganisms, and we intended to test whether farming system effects are mirrored in compositional changes in nematode communities. Therefore, we analysed the impact of three farming systems, conventional (ConMin), integrated (ConSlu) and organic (Organic), on nematode communities in the southeastern part of The Netherlands on a sandy soil with 3–5% organic matter. Effects of each farming system were assessed for four different crops (barley, maize, pea or potato) by a series of taxon-specific quantitative PCRs (qPCR). Changes in community structure analysed by nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) showed that organic farming resulted in specific shifts in nematode community composition exceeding crop-related assemblage shifts. Three out of thirteen quantified nematode taxa showed significant farming system effects. Strongest effects were observed for the (putative) bacterivore Prismatolaimus, which was relatively common in Organic fields and nearly absent in ConMin and ConSlu fields. A reverse effect was observed for Pristionchus; this necromenic bacterivore and facultative predator made up about 21% and 7% of the total nematode community in respectively ConMin and ConSlu fields, whereas it was nearly absent from Organic fields. The observed farming system effects suggest that specific nematode taxa might be indicative for the impact of farming practices on soil biota

Data underlying the publication: "Overzicht maatregelen duurzaam bodembeheer"

In het project is een long list met maatregelen ten behoeve van duurzaam bodembeheer in de landbouw gesynthetiseerd vanuit meerdere bronnen.&nbsp;The project synthesises a long list of measures for sustainable soil management in agriculture from multiple literature sources.</p

Data underlying the publication: "Overzicht maatregelen duurzaam bodembeheer"

In het project is een long list met maatregelen ten behoeve van duurzaam bodembeheer in de landbouw gesynthetiseerd vanuit meerdere bronnen.&nbsp;The project synthesises a long list of measures for sustainable soil management in agriculture from multiple literature sources.</p