Soil Restoration and Monitoring Guidelines

Although we adopt a clear definition of soil health in this report, it does not come with specific guidelines for how to measure or monitor it in practice (Fierer et al., 2021). Particularly, which variables are most relevant to assess the soil’s condition. It is clear that soil health cannot be defined by a single ‘optimal’ state, as it varies across ecosystems and land uses (Bünemann et al., 2018; Lehmann et al., 2020). Still, certain indicators are consistently useful for assessing soil health. For instance, healthy soils typically are well-structured (physical health/condition), contain sufficient SOC to bind water and nutrients (chemical health/condition) and are full of life (biological health/condition) (Frene et al., 2024; Raghavendra et al., 2020; Stewart et al., 2018; Wang & Zhang, 2024). Effective soil restoration addresses these three key categories of soil properties, i.e. physical, chemical, and biological (Raghavendra et al., 2020; Stewart et al., 2018). In this chapter, we propose a set of indicators for each category, some of which are considered ‘scalable’, i.e. designed to be applicable across diverse ecosystems, cost-effective, and easy to implement.