Soil health is a pivotal concept for assessing the capacity of soils to sustain ecosystem functions and resilience, deliver ecosystem services, and support climate chance adaptation and contrast, food security and biodiversity.
Major efforts were made to define soil health, identifying indicators, and developing monitoring scheme to support management and policy at various scales. However, significant challenges remain in indicator choice and integration, methodological harmonisation, data interoperability, scalability. Also, effective uptake by practitioners and decision-makers has been scarce. Transdisciplinary indices are required to integrate biological, chemical and physical aspects which can produce both leading, concurrent and lagging indicators. At the one time, these indices should be scaled in space, time and their temporal significance, and their integration compared to broad system indicators such as life cycle assessment indicators at the farm, forest stand, landscape and regional level.
This session brings together contributions that address soil health from complementary perspectives, spanning conceptual frameworks, indicator development, measurement techniques, modelling approaches, data infrastructures, and applications in real-world contexts. By explicitly linking indicator-centred and practice-centred approaches, the session seeks to advance a coherent and operational understanding of soil health that is scientifically robust, comparable across regions and land uses, and usable in monitoring, planning and policy processes.
The session is structured around six interconnected thematic blocks, covering the full pathway from reference frameworks and indicators to harmonised monitoring systems and societal uptake. Particular attention is given to comparability across scales, integration of physical, chemical and biological indicators, emerging measurement technologies, FAIR data principles, and the translation of soil health assessments into actionable knowledge.