Toward a Global Framework for Harmonized Soil Biodiversity Monitoring

The assessment of soil health has traditionally focused on physical and chemical parameters, while biological components as the living foundation of soil function and resilience remain underrepresented.  As new regulatory frameworks such as the EU Soil Monitoring Law move toward implementation, there is an urgent need for harmonized, science-based approaches to incorporate biological indicators into soil health assessment. 

Current soil biodiversity monitoring guidance draws from four major sources: ISO standards, GLOSOLAN, GLOSOB, and Soil BON, including Soil BON Food Web (SBFW), each offering overlapping but uneven coverage of methods.  While together these frameworks span most major soil biodiversity variables (microbial diversity and biomass, micro-, meso- and macrofauna, enzymes, respiration, and root traits), they differ extensively in accessibility, scope, and standardization detail, creating barriers to harmonized global monitoring.  This methodological fragmentation also limits interoperability and synthesis.  Coordinating protocols and metadata standards is essential to enable soil biodiversity to be embedded into global biodiversity observation systems and policy frameworks (e.g. GBIF, GEO BON, IPBES). 

To advance comparability and coordination in global soil biodiversity monitoring, we propose integrating existing frameworks into a unified, tiered system that balances scientific rigor with global accessibility.  The Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative (GSBI), as a grassroots organization with a mission to provide expert science to inform policy, proposes developing an integrated protocol framework with three tiers: (1) Core open-access methods (e.g., currently available GLOSOLAN protocols and SBFW) accessible to all countries; (2) Intermediate standardized methods aligning GLOSOB and GLOSOLAN with ISO for biodiversity protocols for public release; and (3) Advanced analytical methods (e.g., GLOSOB and Soil BON DNA sequencing) for networks with greater capacity.

Integrating biodiversity metrics into soil health frameworks is not only essential for achieving sustainable soil management but also for aligning global actions under the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Sustainable Development Goals.  Harmonizing, integrating and linking these initiatives can produce global baselines, long-term data integration, and policy-relevant indicators.