Jack

SOIL Used by 7.3 billion people worldwide Food and fibre production Regulation of flooding and water quality Platform for built environment Below and above ground habitat Cultural hertitage, wellbeing Raw materials (peat, sands gravels clay Soils looking after us….

Soil diversity = soil functional diversity

Spatial diversity What soil have we got and where is it? >700 different soil types recognised in England and Wales Surveyed and sampled in 1960s to 1980s

Improving baseline with new mapping techniques Poggio & Gimona, 2014 Soil carbon New mapping but with legacy data

Resilience and function Soil property or function time after Corstanje et al, 2015 Capacity to recover resistance perturbation

Monitoring - national scale Carey et al, National Soil Inventory

Soil threats in the UK Soil erosion Soil compaction Loss of organic matter Soil sealing Graves, et al. 2015

Soil erosion Defra, 2015

Soil compaction Defra, 2015 Palmer & Smith, 2013 waterlogged soils sands chalk soils

Loss of organic carbon Johnson et al 2009 arable grassland

Change in topsoil organic carbon Bellamy et al 2005

Comparison organic carbon change between monitoring schemes NSI Countryside survey Arable to Permanent grassland to 0.13 Deciduous woodland to 1.09 Bog to 0.65 after Reynolds et al, 2013

Cost of soil degradation Soil degradation process Change in soil properties & functions Erosion Compaction OM loss Physical, biological, chemical, Soil formation, Nutrient cycling Change in soil services Graves et al 2011, 2015 Food provision Flood regulation Water purification Change in costs Crop yield Flood damage Water treatment Estimated annual cost of soil degradation = £1.2 billion [& many impacts are “off-site”]

We have a good idea of national baseline of soil - including developments in new spatial representations National scale monitoring data – identify future sampling (lag time in some properties/functions) How to represent function and [likely] resilience Scaling up from experimental/plot/farm Using a national framework to identify vulnerabilities and support action and innovation to mitigate threats Summary