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Defining, Measuring, And Applying Soil Quality: An Unresolved Debate, Salvador Ramirez Ii
Defining, Measuring, And Applying Soil Quality: An Unresolved Debate, Salvador Ramirez Ii
Doctor of Plant Health Program: Dissertations and Student Research
Paradigm shifts occur periodically in the sciences. Proposed paradigm shifts offer opportunities to reexamine extant paradigms and evaluate new ones. Soil science experienced a controversy resembling a proposed paradigm shift in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it grappled with the idea of soil quality (SQ). The most contentious points in the SQ debates were (1) the word “quality” itself and designing a functional definition, (2) identifying appropriate soil quality indicators, (3) the integration of soil quality indicators, and (4) the interpretation of soil quality indicators. The latter three disagreements were rooted in the established, fundamental, soil science paradigm. …