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Assessing Soil Quality for Environmental Purposes: Roles and Challenges for Soil Scientists

Dep. of Plant and Soil Sciences, Univ. of Delaware, Newark, DE 19717-1303

S. D. Cunningham

DuPont Company, Wilmington, DE

M. E. Sumner

Dep. of Crop and Soil Sciences, Univ. of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602

^* Corresponding author (jtsims{at}strauss.ude1.edu).

ABSTRACT

Soil quality is emerging as an issue of vital importance to the use and management of land, water, and air. Clearly, we must maintain soils in a clean state that is suitable for agriculture, that minimizes the pollution of water and air, and that allows for the safe and productive use of wastes and by-products as soil amendments. We must also remediate many unclean soils that have been severely impacted by anthropogenic activities. It can be argued that to sensibly approach these complex tasks we must first begin to develop a consensus on the proper means to assess soil quality from an environmental perspective. In doing so we must recognize that conceptual and mechanistic interpretations of soil quality will vary with the intended use of the land and will not always be the same for nonagricultural and agricultural systems. Measures of soil quality important for environmentally sound agronomic crop production will not always be the most appropriate for contaminated soils where cost-effective remediation is often the primary objective. This paper raises some fundamental questions about the changing role of soil scientists who now must contribute more than ever to the research, technology transfer, and public policy critical to soil and environmental quality. The need for soil scientists to take a proactive role in framing, from all perspectives, the debate on soil quality and environmental issues is emphasized, as is the need for new approaches to quantify the environmental risks posed by soils in agricultural and nonagricultural settings.

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