Soils are essential for facing humanity’s existential challenges of food security, water security, climate change mitigation and adaptation, sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Whilst the increasing demand for food, clean water and energy by society intensify the pressures on soils, the importance of maintaining the soil resources has gained recognition in the last decades. This emphasizes the need to manage soils according to their intrinsic capability and to assess the effects of human activities on soil condition, so that we can ensure the long-term provision of the services they provide. For example, intensive forestry operations in steep soils can increase erosion, loss of soil organic carbon (SOC) and depletion of nutrients, affecting the growth of trees and other ecosystem functions. Thus, it is important to identify thresholds for soil properties that are used as indicators of functions, to warn us of a possible degradation in soil condition. But every soil is different. What we imagine as a healthy soil, or a soil in good condition, may look very different depending on the pedoclimatic context. We need to identify references specific to the soil class, the local climate, landscape and land use history. These references are suitable for local and regional management. Finding these references becomes difficult in places with a long history of intensive soil use.
The main goals of SELVANS were to implement a digital soil mapping framework for setting class-specific thresholds and assessing the effects of forest management on soil condition with respect to reference soils. This knowledge will inform sustainable forest management strategies in the Basque Country, maintain soil multifunctionality, counteract the risk of soil degradation, and upscale estimates on soil condition and capability. The second and more conceptual objective was to design a modelling approach for quantifying soil change in the context of long-term intensive soil use, using France as a case study.
