SOIL FUNCTIONS DEPENDING ON SOIL INDICATORS IN VARIOUS ENVIRONMENTS AND LAND USES – A CASE STUDY OF ROMANIA

Soil is an indispensable natural resource for the existence of various ecosystems and human activities, such as agriculture, silviculture and, pastoral activity. In addition to water, soil is the most important resource for life on Earth. Internationally, soil functions were defined and dealt with at the European level. The purpose of this study is to define, adapt, quantify, and assess some soil health functions and their component indicators related to land uses and to the main soil classes and soil types across Romanian territory. Five soil functions were studied over 10 soil classes and 22 soil types: 1) organic matter cycle, 2) nutrient cycle, 3) biodiversity support cycle, 4) water cycle, and 5) contaminant cycle. These five soil functions show that most of the Romanian soils present a satisfactory average health situation because there were not severe degradation processes occurring on a large scale. However, individual soil profiles may present even extreme values. From all the five soil functions, the contamination cycle function is critical for soil health. All non-polluted Romanian soils are in a different degree of health, while the polluted hotspot soils are in a different degree of illness. The more numerous and more uniformly distributed soil data, the more accurate the results for the studied territory. Including soil sub-types and varieties, as well as more new experiments on the soil indicators, would extend, typify, and enlarge the range of functions’ scores. Thus, the presented method has the potential to be continuously improved.