Soil information for a changing world

Excerpt

Earlier this summer I was asked to address the National Cooperative Soil Survey Conference on the topic of soil information for a changing world. Clearly, our world is changing and those changes are rapid, multidirectional, and complex. How to provide natural resource and conservation information that is scientifically credible, consistent, and comparable to users whose needs, capabilities, and challenges are constantly changing is a big question for conservationists.

I had a hard time pulling together my thoughts because soil information is so important to conservation, the needs soils information should meet are multiplying, and budgets are shrinking. I struggled to try to pinpoint a few changes that I thought would and should shape future soils information systems.

I looked at that speech again the other day (I was catching up on tiling) and can boil it down to this. In the last fifteen years, we have lived through a hndamental shift in emphasis from resource development and conservation of soil productivity to environmental management and conservation of soil quality. That shift has been driven by the growing demand to deal with the environmental consequences-both good and bad-of food and fiber production and by the growing scientific understandmg of …