Soil resilience; Managing soil quality challenges in modern agriculture

In India, soil degradation poses a serious challenge to environmental quality and agricultural sustainability in both irrigated and rain-fed agro-ecosystems (57% of the cultivated land). The result of such degradation is a perceived decline or stagnation in crop yield, partial factor productivity of inputs, and quality of the produce. Under intensive cropping systems, the main cause of yield drop is a decrease in SOM and the nutrients it is connected with in the soil (Muralidharudu et al., 2011). The vital ecological functions of soil are harmed by these degrading forces and processes, which eventually affect the health/quality of the soil. The degree of degradation soil quality assessment, fitness for use, resilience "ability to recover," and identification of diagnostic recovery modules are the only solutions available to address this crucial problem for the sustainable use of soil and its protection against degradation (Fig. 1). For the purpose of identifying the most appropriate soil quality indicators, the idea of soil quality and the methods for evaluating it in relation to different soil functions have developed to a significant degree (Fig. 2). Although the indicators are used for soil quality monitoring (Andrews et al., 2004), they have not yet been established for resilience purposes to evaluate the ease and degree of recovery of degraded systems (Kuan et al., 2006).