Application of Soil Quality to Monitoring and Management

Abstract

Recent interest in soil quality and rangeland health, and the large areas set aside under the USDA Conservation Reserve Program, have contributed to a gradual convergence of assessment, monitoring, and management approaches in croplands and rangelands. The objective of this paper is to describe a basis for integrating soils and soil quality into rangeland monitoring, and through monitoring, into management. Previous attempts to integrate soil indicators into rangeland monitoring programs have often failed due to a lack of understanding of how to apply those indicators to ecosystem function and management. We discuss four guidelines that we have used to select and interpret soil and soil quality indicators in rangelands and illustrate them using a recently developed rangeland monitoring system. The guidelines include (i) identifying a suite of indicators that are consistently correlated with the functional status of one or more critical ecosystem processes, including those related to soil stability, soil water infiltration, and the capacity of the ecosystem to recover following disturbance; (ii) basing indicator selection on inherent soil and site characteristics and on site‐ or project‐specific resource concerns, such as erosion or species invasion; (iii) using spatial variability in developing and interpreting indicators to make them more representative of ecological processes; and (iv) interpreting indicators in the context of an understanding of dynamic, nonlinear ecological processes defined by thresholds. The approach defined by these guidelines may serve as a paradigm for applying the soil quality concept in other ecosystems, including forests and ecosystems managed for annual and perennial crop production.