Soil Health Indicators for Scotland Soil Health Indicators reflecting the situation in Scotland – Are they working?

Any monitoring or management of soils need to incorporate the understanding of the chemical, physical and biological processes that combine together to produce a healthy soil. A list of soil quality indicators for the UK suggested by AHDB was compared with a list compiled from a structured literature review of published papers from 2000.

These lists compared well and as a result of concerns about soil organic matter raised with farmers groups the method suggested by the AHDB work was investigated in more detail for Scottish soils. The method preformed relatively well but did under estimate some intensive short term grassland layers and may not be suitable for upland grassland with large amounts of soil organic matter.