Molecular Approaches to Assessing Soil Health and Biological Function.

The use of indices to approximate complex changes is common to a wide variety of fields ranging from biology to economics. The potential benefit is that they can be easily understood, compared across sites, and have the potential to document changes arising from the simultaneous input of multiple signals.  Soils are comprised of physical, chemical, and biological factors.  Of these, the first two are arguably the best understood and can be assessed by a wide variety of methods.  Although, advances in techniques (eg. Enzymatic, next-gen-sequencing, PLFA, etc.) have increased our ability to assess the biological component of soils the relevant factors or indices of an active and healthy soil biological component is lacking.  The goal of this talk is to provide the framework for a new soil biology index that is relevant to agriculture and agricultural management decisions. Ideally an index is (i) responsive to management, (ii) can be used to identify specific problems, (iii) easy to interpret, and (iv) comparable across systems (both environmental and management).  We need to move beyond the ‘black box’ approach to soil biology.