On the Definition of the Natural Capital of Soils: A Framework for Description, Evaluation, and Monitoring

摘要: The unknown consequences and potential impacts of mankind’s ability to destroy, alter, or manipulate ecosystems on a vast scale drives our need better understand the earth system. A fundamental challenge for soil science in 21st century is role of soil processes relation function system. Th e rationale developing a defi nition natural capital stems from premise that we value ‘things’ based their perceived human well-being. As consequence, ignorance resource, or system, may lead its neglect omission decision making. erefore, there a need develop defi capital, fi tting within broad framework, which can be used assess ecosystem services contribute earth system. ough various nitions have been proposed, mostly the agricultural context, it still remains nebulous ill-defi ned term. objective this paper is an embracing ‘natural capital’ focusing (i) mass, (ii) energy, and (iii) organization/entropy. Mass further subdivided into solid, liquid gas phases, and organization physicochemical, biotic, spatiotemporal structure. We diff erentiate between two aspects quantity quality. result nition, soil moisture, temperature, structure emerge as valuable stocks, alongside more traditionally viewed stocks such inorganic (mineralogy, texture) organic materials (OM content). We go demonstrate how ts and how using integrated valuation process models can evaluated. Finally discuss measurement monitoring needs t with vision evaluation.