Defining soil quality by different soil bio-indexes: the Castelporziano reserved area experience

Abstract

From 1995 to the present time, the Working Group “Soil”, led by the “Consiglio per la Ricerca e la sperimentazione in Agricoltura—Centro di ricerca per lo studio delle Relazioni tra Pianta e Suolo”, has promoted and performed the continual monitoring of the soil quality in the reserved area of Castelporziano, with the aim to identify specific indicators able to describe the biological fertility of forest and agricultural soils. Particularly, quantitative and qualitative investigations were performed on the soil organic matter to assess the relationships between changes in activity, composition and biodiversity of soil microbial biomass and the turnover of organic matter, by comparing pairs of sites that, while insisting on the same soil substrate, were managed in different ways for long time. This review summarizes the results obtained in about 10 years of monitoring of different soil sites in Castelporziano, which were representative of a wide variety of environments such as sandy dunes, retro-dune wetlands zones, Mediterranean high and low pseudo-steppe, Mediterranean lowland mixed forests, cork oak forests, pine forests, meadows for grazing wild boars, anthropic environments. In this sense, the Castelporziano experience, as a kind of “research gym”, can be taken as primary reference for the Mediterranean ecosystems in their entirety.