Giulia Bongiorno

Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Department of Soil Quality

Capturing the complexity of soil life for soil quality assessments is one of the most challenging paradoxes of contemporary soil science. Soil biota perform a plethora of processes that are fundamental to soil quality. As the concept of soil quality developed, so have the attempts to integrate soil biological measurements into monitoring schemes fr...

Soil biota contribute to the delivery of multiple soil functions. However, soil biological methods are highly underrepresented in the assessment of soil functionality in agricultural production systems. Here we present a flexible tool to support decision-making during the selection process of soil biological methods for monitoring soil functions. T...

Assessing soil microbial functionality has the potential to reveal meaningful effects of soil management on soil processes influencing soil quality. We used MicroResp™ to assess microbial respiration upon the addition of six carbon substrates (glucose, alanine, aminobutyric acid, N-acetyl glucosamine, alpha-ketoglutaric acid, and lignin). From this...

Developments in soil biology and in methods to characterize soil organic carbon can potentially deliver novel soil quality indicators that can help identify management practices able to sustain soil productivity and environmental resilience. This work aimed at synthesizing results regarding the suitability of a range of soil biological and biochemi...

Assessment of the suitability of different labile carbon fractions as soil quality indicators for agricultural management in 10 European long-term field experiments. We tested their sensitivity to agricultural management and linkage with various soil parameters. The concentration of labile carbon fractions were increased in reduced tillage and high...

Soil nematode communities and food web indices can inform about the complexity, nutrient flows and decomposition pathways of soil food webs, reflecting soil quality. Relative abundance of nematode feeding and life‐history groups are used for calculating food web indices, i.e. maturity index (MI), enrichment index (EI), structure index (SI) and chan...

Soil suppressiveness to pathogens is defined as the capacity of soil to regulate soil-borne pathogens. It can be managed by agricultural practices, but the effects reported so far remain inconsistent. Soil suppressiveness is difficult to predict and for this reason different soil properties have been linked to it with the aim to find informative in...

Sampling and analysis or visual examination of soil to assess its status and use potential is widely practiced from plot to national scales. However, the choice of relevant soil attributes and interpretation of measurements are not straightforward, because of the complexity and site-specificity of soils, legacy effects of previous land use, and tra...