Soil health: Assessing and monitoring using soil biology

Soil health: Assessing and monitoring using soil biology Lynette Abbott from The University of Western Australia, focuses again on soil health, this time by assessing and monitoring using soil biological indicators. There is considerable interest in monitoring and quantifying soil biology as an indicator of soil health. (1) However, this is a complex task because of (i) the extreme diversity of soil organisms (2), (ii) the wide range of processes they participate in within soil, (iii) their heterogeneous distribution within the soil profile, (iv) their heterogeneous distribution within the soil matrix, and (v) because their abundance and activity can be very responsive to their surroundings.