RD 1.1.4 Soil management

Soils provide a range of benefits for society including growing crops and timber, regulating water flow, and storing carbon. However, these functions face threats from soil erosion, compaction, contamination, and losses to urban expansion. It is therefore vital that soils are managed sustainably to ensure that future generations have healthy soils that can provide these functions that are demanded by society and ensure our food security into the future.

Providing tools to enable land managers to sustainably manage soils, reduce degradation of the soil resource and minimise the impact on other parts of the environment can help to protect and enhance soil quality. These tools can range from rapid methods to assess changes in soil quality to providing guidance on which soils are susceptible to erosion or compaction.

The UN sustainable Development goals, the National Performance Framework, the Land Use Strategy and Scottish Soil Framework (and others) all give an overarching context to the current research.

Aim of Research

To support the sustainable use and management of Scotland’s soil resource. We will provide new and improved tools to predict how soil functions respond to land use, management and environmental pressures. These decision support tools will enable users to address a wide range of policies and decision-making across scales from field to national to help improve the management of our natural assets to support sustainable land-based industries, increase the land under sustainable soil management and restore degraded soils to enhance and safeguard the multi-functional capacity of Scotland’s soils under a changing climate and other drivers of change.
 

Further information

General information on the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institutes (SEFARI) and the Scottish Government funded Strategic Research Portfolio can be found on the SEFARI website.
Within this, there are webpages providing summary overview information for each of the Research Deliverables (RDs) within the Strategic Programme. The page for RD 1.1.4 Soil Management is available here and includes annual progress and highlights summaries, key outputs and links to case studies and key research staff.
 

Many of the outputs from this and related work will also be available on Scotland's Soils website.