Microbiological tools for assessing impacts on soil organic matter content

Abstract

Soil organic matter (SOM) is fundamental to soil quality and has been suggested as the single most important indicator of soil quality and productivity. For any given soil and climate, the amount of SOM is determined by land use and soil management, but the usefulness of SOM data for soil quality monitoring is constrained by the difficulty of experimentally verifying changes over short periods of time. Long-term experiments seem to offer only a partial solution to this problem.