Soil Quality and Ecosystem Services: Towards a New Perspective of Soil Use and Management

All soil ecosystems provide good services for society, so- called “ecosystem services”. The health of a soil ecosystem can therefore be determined from its physical, chemical, and biological properties, such as activity levels, stability, resilience, and organization. Both soil protection and soil remediation will therefore benefit from describing desirable soil quality in ecological terms. In view of these topics, the present Special Issue intends to present a rational soil use within a management framework for the identification of ecosystem aspects that can be considered as critical issues of soil, needing protection to achieve a soil which is suitable for agricultural use or other purposes. The main goal of this Special Issue is to give a general description of ecosystem services and representative indicators for a selection of specific soil types and land use, and to develop a rational and systematic approach to identify the highest-risk scenarios in land use in view of environmental stressors, based on vulnerability assessment of indicators for ecosystem services.