SSSN 2023 Master Class

Soil Quality Assessment and Measurement for Crop Production

Prof. Martin A.N Anikwe Fssn, Rss.
Department of Agronomy and Ecological Management
Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources Management,
Enugu State University of Science and Technology Nigeria.

The inherent differences among soils, the complexity of environments within which soils exist, and the variety of soil and crop management practices being used worldwide currently require establishing a specific rating or value against which all soils can be compared. Current research efforts in soil quality assessment and monitoring was reviewed for agronomists, practising soil scientists, students, environmentalist, and other professional working with soils to enable them to contribute using standard procedures to the development of framework or indexing procedure that can be easily modified for different soils and used to enumerate dynamic soil quality ratings, determine trends in those ratings, and thus be used to quantify the effect of soil and crop management decisions. This masterclass will deal with aspects of soil quality, the development of soil quality concepts and indicators used in soil quality evaluations. Aspects concerning scaling of indicators, choosing appropriate indicators, transforming indicator scores, combining indicators to an index and using individual indicators in soil quality evaluations will be elucidated.
This masterclass will be based on the current literature review of worldwide state–of–art research on soil quality. The principal aim was to stimulate quality research and collection of data using standard procedures for monitoring soil quality since it has been shown that developing countries’ scientists are lagging in this area of study.