Authors: Jasmin Liedtke,  Surya Gupta, Valentin Amrhein, Christine Alewell
Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland

The European Soil Strategy for 2030 in combination with the Soil Monitoring Law aim
to support the restoration of soils across Europe and reduce overall soil loss and
degradation. Despite its fundamental role in supporting ecosystem functioning and
biodiversity, soil health is rarely included in monitoring of protected areas. In addition,
and despite soils being the fundament of all terrestrial ecosystems, soil protection
and nature conservation continue to be addressed largely separately in policy
strategies. We systematically reviewed the literature to investigate how soil has been
observed and potentially monitored within protected areas and how useful this could
be to assess soil health in nature conservation. Overall, there was a lack of
awareness for soil or soil health in conservation contexts, and there was little
consensus on which indicators could be monitored and be suitable for long-term
assessments. Only few protected areas assessed soil parameters at all, and if so, it
was often to address specific conservation challenges with indicators chosen to the
local conditions. No indicator set was meaningful on its own for European-wide
conservation targets, which highlights the need for an integrative soil health
monitoring method for protected areas. SHERPA was designed with an open
decision-tree structure and would therefore already be applicable in most cases with
its existing keys for forests and grasslands. The development of additional keys for
wetlands and sparsely vegetated areas will be needed, because these land use
types are priorities for conservation in Europe. Integrating soil health and soil
monitoring into conservation contexts could not only significantly improve
conservation effectiveness but be critical for achieving the targets of the EU
Biodiversity Strategy for 2030.