WDC52: Implementing and Correlating Soil Health Management and Assessment in Western States
(Multistate Research Coordinating Committee and Information Exchange Group)
Status: Inactive/Terminating
WDC52: Implementing and Correlating Soil Health Management and Assessment in Western States
Duration: 06/01/2020 to 01/14/2021
Administrative Advisor(s):
NIFA Reps:
Non-Technical Summary
Statement of Issues and Justification
Sustainable intensification of agricultural productivity is essential to meet demands of the growing population without degrading ecosystem functions. Healthy soils provide the foundation for sustainable intensification by supporting optimal productivity, maintaining biodiversity, supporting climate-resilient agricultural enterprises, and sequestering atmospheric carbon to mitigate global warming.
During the last decade, a USDA-sponsored initiative successfully generated a great deal of excitement around soil health. But zeal to implement soil health farming practices outpaced identification of sound soil health assessment methods and sometimes led to claims that overreached what could be accomplished in terms of organic matter accumulation or other soil attributes, especially for soils of the arid and semiarid western US. More recently the NRCS Soil Health Division, the Soil Health Institute, and university and federal researchers have begun to scientifically develop effective, environment-specific, chemical, physical, and biological assessment methods, or to identify and refine those developed over the last 40 to 50 years.
As such, soil health assessment is becoming an effective indicator of management system sustainability and federal and state agencies are developing inventory and incentive strategies. But the many combinations of soil type, regional climate, management history, economic drivers, and variable climate change trajectories do not follow state or other jurisdictional boundaries, meaning that the most effective soil health assessment tools vary from place to place. Water-constrained systems of the western states, with inherently low organic matter and often high salinity, require different approaches toward assessment than more humid regions. The multi-state research project proposed here would implement a coordinated strategy to identify best soil health management and assessment approaches for western production systems.
Justification for forming a Multi-state Research Project: A multi-state research project will facilitate a coordinated regional effort to develop and evaluate soil health indicators using a sound, co-designed scientific approach that results in a minimum data set of indicators for each soil-climate-management system scenario. Meetings of representatives from western Land-Grant universities, soil testing laboratories, state and federal agencies, and others will foster exchange of ideas and approaches, as well as collaborative sub-regional projects.
Potential duplication of efforts of existing committees: Several active committees mention soil health in project descriptions and objectives, but none focus on developing regionally coordinated assessment and implementation approaches. The most closely related existing committee may be NC1178: Land Use and Management Practice Impacts on Soil Carbon and Associated Agroecosystem Services, but its focus is on evaluating the effects of management practices on soil organic carbon and other impacts in the North Central region. NCERA3: Soil and Landscape Assessment, Function and Interpretation focuses on pedology and coordination with the National Cooperative Soil Survey in the North Central region. In the western region, there may be some membership overlap with WERA103: Nutrient Management and Water Quality, but the focus of that group is on extension education efforts, primarily about fertilizer management. Interaction and coordination with that group would be beneficial to their objectives and ours. W4170: Beneficial Use of Residuals to Improve Soil Health and Protect Public, and Ecosystem Health may also have some members that would be part of this group, which would benefit both, but the focus of W4170 is on use of industrial wastes or biproducts as soil amendments and is made up mostly of soil chemists.
Objectives
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Develop a systematic multi-state research protocol for determining soil health minimum datasets for soil-climate-management system subregions.
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Develop a full proposal for a W project.