Abstract
The research will address specific requirements of the inter-departmental UK Soil Indicators Consortium to develop a set of policy relevant and scientifically robust indicators of soil quality. SQID Phase II (Scoping biological indicators of soil quality) will field test a candidate suite of biological indicators for deployment in a national-scale soil monitoring scheme. The 13 indicators were prioritised through a robust assessment process in the preceding SQID project (SP0529) and show high relevance and applicability to large-scale monitoring of soils. The biological indicators under investigation have specific relevance to the maintenance of soil health, via the delivery of ecological processes, and are highly relevant to the soil functions of: food and fibre production, environmental interactions and ecological habitats and biodiversity. The project will carry out two field trials over a two year period. The first, in 2006/7, will assess whether the biological indicators are sensitive enough to detect environmental change against the background of inherent spatial and temporal variability (SENSITIVITY trial). The second trial, in 2007/8, will assess whether the biological indicators provide consistent and reproducible results across the UK range of soil:land use combinations (DISCRIMINATION trial). In the process, the project will establish a set of standard operation procedures that optimise interlaboratory comparability and overall reproducibility of results. These SOPs will be transferable to any soil monitoring scheme. A range of statistical techniques will be applied to determine which biological indicators provide the most robust results, the metric required for monitoring and the degree of surrogacy between the different indicators. The consortium will link with the Countryside Survey 2007 for the Discrimination trial and access long-term experiments for the Sensitivity trial, through arrangements with the UK Sewage Sludge Trial, CEH/Defra and (JIM can you put a name to this please). The data derived from CS2007 squares will be maintained by CEH within the ORACLE-based Countryside Information Data System as a component of the MASQ database. The final product will be a report that provides a breakdown on the usefulness of each biological indicator to national-scale soil monitoring; the robustness of the different type of information obtained; the practicability, and therefore cost implications, of application of each indicator in a large-scale monitoring scheme and the relative value of the indicator with respect to others, including issues of complete or partial surrogacy relating to informing on ecological processes and the key soil functions. This information can be used by UK-SIC to inform the specification of biological indicators for national-scale soil monitoring and for other policy-related soil issues. The information will also be invaluable to the wider scientific community since it will a comprehensive assessment of ecologically-relevant components of the soil community.
United Kingdom