Manuscript Topics

Soil quality, also called soil health, is the optimization of soil’s physical, chemical, and biological properties and thus its capacity and productivity to sustain plants, animals, and humans through its ecosystem services. Soil has diverse physical, chemical, and biological properties, which lead to different responses to different management practices, to resilience to soil disturbance, and to climate change. Promoting sustainable soil management (SSM) is one valuable tool to increase soil health, meet global food production, adapt to climate change, safeguard ecosystem services, and increase biodiversity, especially in agriculture. Several strategies have been identified to promote SSM and increase soil health, including minimizing soil disturbance, maximizing soil cover, maximizing living roots, and maximizing biodiversity.

In the past few decades, remote technologies have dramatically advanced to provide better radiometric, spatial, and spectral resolution imaging products which can be used to assess soil health. In addition, the wide variety of GIS-based spatial analysis algorithms, machine learning algorithms, and artificial intelligence techniques have offered further opportunities for assessing soil health at fine, regional, or global scales. Both GIS and remote sensing technologies are helpful and informative in monitoring the soil’s chemical, biological, and physical properties for time-efficient and effective information for diverse audiences, such as scientists, policymakers, stakeholders, and farmers.

Therefore, for this Special Issue, we aim to provide insights on both i) soil quality assessments (i.e., quantification of soil chemical, physical and biological properties and indicators in various soil management systems); and ii) sustainable soil practices that promote soil quality in various ecosystems by integrating GIS and remote sensing technologies. All types of contributions (original research, reviews, and meta-analyses) are encouraged. Specifically, this special issue intends to cover recent progress on the following topics.

• Influence of cropping and fertilizer practices on soil organic matter, nutrient cycling, soil biodiversity, microbial communities, and other soil ecosystem services.
• Assessing the effects of integrated agricultural management practices on soil health at local, regional, and global scales
• Assessing sustainable management practices for soil improvement in various agroecosystems, such as agroforestry, and other soil managed for timber, fiber, fuel production, etc.
• Plant symbiont interactions on soil quality and service provisioning.
• Influence of climate change on soil quality and ecosystem services.
• Application of GIS and remote sensing technologies in assessing and mapping dynamics of soil properties, soil indicators, changes in land cover and land management at local, regional, and global scales, such as using multi-sources spatial datasets, pixel-based/object-based image analysis, machine learning, artificial intelligence algorithms, and GIS models.
• Accuracy assessment and method/algorithm development for mapping soil quality
• Multi-year field studies or proof of concept investigations in greenhouses or modified environments

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