Assessing the quality of rangeland soils: Challenges and opportunities

Jeffrey E. Herrick; Walter G. Whitford

Excerpt

Rangeland soils present unique challenges and opportunities for assessing soil quality. Three characteristics in particular distinguish rangeland soils from cropped soils: (1) spatial variability in rangelands tends to be higher than in cropped systems; (2) temporal variability is high because many biological and physical processes depend on a limited and frequently unpredictable supply of soil moisture; (3) the land often has many uses in addition to food production.

While all three characteristics present obstacles to the development of reliable soil quality indicators, each also presents additional opportunities. Patterns of both spatial and temporal variability can be quantifiable attributes of the system that may provide additional information about soil processes.

Conflicting definitions of soil quality are often implicitly, but not explicitly, based on a particular value or use. These conflicts may be resolved using an alternative paradigm in which soil quality is defined only with respect to the soil's capacity to fulfill clearly defined functions. Ratings for individual functions can then be compared for a variety of values and land uses.

Spatial variability

The spatial variability of many rangeland soil properties is extraordinarily high when compared with typical land under cultivation. This high level of variability occurs at a variety of scales, from regional to microsite. …

Footnotes

Jeffrey E. Herrick is an associated research specialist, U.S. Department of Agriculture—Agricultural Research Service, Jornada Experimental Range, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. Walter G. Whitford is a senior research scientist U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Environmental Monitoring Systems Laboratory, Las Vegas, NV. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency partially funded and collaborated in the research described here. It has been subjected to the Agency's peer review and has been approved as an EPA publication. The U.S. Government has a nonexclusive, royality-free license in and to any copyright covering this article.
Copyright 1995 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society

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