How can we monitor soil health for NbS?
Soil health is critical for the success of nature-based solutions (NbS). It underpins ecosystem multifunctionality and resilience by supporting biodiversity, improving carbon sequestration and storage, regulating water flow, and enhancing plant productivity. NbS projects often protect soil health and restore degraded soil. Yet many NbS projects do not monitor soil health. A new paper explores the challenges and opportunities in monitoring soil health and introduces a practical tool to help select suitable metrics for monitoring soil and biodiversity.
Led by Licida Giuliani, the review, “Advancing nature-based solutions through enhanced soil health monitoring in the United Kingdom”, was published yesterday in Soil Use & Management as part of a special issue on integrating NbS into soil and land management decisions.
Co-author and NbSI researcher Emily Warner takes us through the key findings:
The importance of soil health for successful and sustainable NbS
Soil health is made up of chemical, physical, and biological properties, which contribute to key soil processes and functions. Physical properties reflect pores, aggregates, and structures in soil that determine the movement of air and water, and provide habitat for soil biodiversity. Chemical properties influence the transformation of chemical components, providing energy and nutrition. Biological properties include biodiversity, ranging from the genetic to community level, as well as the biochemical and biophysical processes that they influence. We emphasise the interlinked and reciprocal relationship between above- and below-ground ecosystems, such that successful NbS are dependent on, benefit from, and support healthy soils.
How can soil health be monitored?
To maximise synergies between soil health and other outcomes of NbS projects, we need a robust system for monitoring soil health outcomes. A current absence of guidelines on enhancing soil health and metrics for assessing soil health mean that it is often overlooked in habitat restoration projects, limiting their potential. Our review considers the existing frameworks and metrics for monitoring soil health, highlighting the variety of different metrics and sampling protocols available for soil health assessment.
Robust monitoring, reporting and verification systems are essential to ensure that policies and practices of soil health improvement are effectively implemented and achieve their intended outcomes. The first step to developing a robust monitoring system is to identify appropriate soil health indicators. We explore the tensions between adopting a standardised set of metrics, to facilitate comparisons between sites and projects, and reflecting the complexity and local variability of soil systems, and the diverse priorities, skills and resources of stakeholders. To address this, we recommend integrating a range of monitoring techniques which encompass soil and above-ground biodiversity alongside socio-economic outcomes, to provide a cohesive narrative on ecosystem health in NbS.
For practical implementation of this approach, we introduce an interactive tool to help users select suitable soil and biodiversity metrics.
The Biodiversity and Soil Health Metrics Tool (Warner et al. 2024) provides a framework for selecting above-ground ecological metrics and soil health indicators for assessing NbS outcomes, developed as part of the Agile Initiative Sprint on Scaling up Nature-based Solutions in the UK. It allows practitioners to filter metrics based on their project needs, feasibility of data collection, and informativeness for each metric.
Finally, we emphasise the need for supportive policy frameworks and incentives to effectively integrate soil health into current and future NbS. Regulatory support, guidance, and funding mechanisms will be key to enabling long-term systemic change.
Read the new paper: Advancing nature-based solutions through enhanced soil health monitoring in the United Kingdom.
Explore the Biodiversity and Soil Health Metrics Tool on our NbS Hub.
