Soil health embraces the importance of soil function to the wider ecosystem in the past, presence, and future. Despite the formulation of such a holistic concept alongside its implementation in legal frameworks (e.g. the EU soil monitoring law), the quantification of soil health has continuing challenges. The first question is how to bound soil health, in essence, i) what is the appropriate reference framework, followed by ii) assessing how soil health should be monitored in a statistically robust way, iii) how should the most appropriate indicators be selected, iv) how do we ensure that indicators are robust to future technological change, and v) how do we integrate indicators into efficient indices? To meet these expectations for soil health evaluation and assessment, we need to establish known indicators and investigate new ones. Transdisciplinary indices are required that integrate biological, chemical and physical aspects which can produce both leading, concurrent and lagging indicators. This will require new measurement techniques including remote sensing of large areas, publicly available datasets of collected soil properties (e.g. LUCAS), and the use of mapping including artificial intelligence to process the plethora of data (e.g. EcoDataCube.eu; SoilGrids). Moreover, it needs to be determined how to integrate such new approaches into established monitoring.
To move from purely a collection of indicators to indicator integration and evolution for different soil types and land covers, we invite presentations on:
• Definition of reference and potential soil health status
• Development of soil health indicator framing in support of the EU soil monitoring law
• Testing new soil health indicators related to the risk of compaction, erosion, reduced biological activity and diversity, contamination and salinization, and depletion of organic matter and nutrients and how it changes
• Formulation of soil health indicators and indices across disciplines; integrating biological, chemical, and physical indicators
• New measurement techniques which enable the efficient monitoring of state and change indicators
• Modelling approaches to bridge the scale gap between point measurements and Pan-European monitoring