Carbon on the Landscape: Management for Soil Health.

The establishment of the Soil Health Division at USDA-NRCS signals a new approach to soil sustainability, especially in managed agriculture lands. Maintaining healthy soils is important under the increased demands for more food and fiber and climate change uncertainties. Over the past 100 years US Soil Survey has developed an extensive inventory of soils and major landscapes nationwide. The data and information compiled from these surveys continues to support conservation management practices for sustainable use of natural resources, especially soils. An efficient soil health approach would require detailed soil data and information at farm and field levels. Soil landscape models provide in depth understanding of spatial-temporal soil processes and property distribution. A single farm or field may span across various landscapes and vice versa. Each landscape and/or slope position within and between fields functions in unique ways with respect to plant growth and other ecosystem functions. The emergence of geospatial and remote sensing technologies coupled with high temporal and spatial resolution data from a wide range of sensors has been at the base of developments such as precision agriculture. We discuss the merits of combining these latest technologies with current soil landscape information as a unique opportunity for increasing the efficiency of soil health initiatives. We argue that incorporating soil landscapes would broaden the scope and scale of soil health approach and strengthen its scientific base.