Connecting Soil Health Assessment with Ecosystem Services

The other focus of my work conducted at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was to improve the interpretation of soil health indicators (SHIs). A meta-analytical approach was applied to investigate the scoring of SHIs using environmental covariates and the connections between SHIs and ecosystem services. The work showed the importance of collecting soil data, covariates, and key ecosystem service outcomes (e.g., GHG emissions, N leaching, ecosystem productivity) for future field sampling campaigns. In addition, regression-based models were established to enable the estimation of SHI responsiveness to conservation practices while accounting for site-specific parameters. Another project of mine investigated the use of a rapid and cost-effective method based on soil spectroscopy to assess a suite of SHIs at the regional scale, which identified the need for improving the transferability of infrared-based soil predictive models.