Key Biochemical Attributes to Assess Soil Ecosystem Sustainability

摘要: Soil is not a renewable resource, at least within the human timescale. In general, any anthropic exploitation of soils tends to disturb or divert them from more “natural” development which, by definition, represents best comparison term for measuring relative shift soil sustainability. The continuous degradation health and quality due abuse land potentiality intensive management occurs since decades. microbiota, being ‘the biological engine Earth’, provides pivotal services in ecosystem functioning. Hence, practices protecting microbial diversity resilience, should be pursued. Besides, abnormal change rate innumerable biochemical processes, as mediated communities, may constitute early sensitive warning homeostasis alteration and, therefore, diagnoses possible risk Among vastness processes related attributes (bioindicators) potentially able assess sustainable use soils, those mineralisation-immobilisation major nutrients (C N), including enzyme activity (functioning) composition (community diversity) biomass, have paramount importance their centrality metabolism. this chapter we compared, under various pedoclimates, impact different agricultural factors (fertilisation, tillage, etc.) either managements on community functioning both classical molecular indicators, order outline most reliable assessing risky shifts