The wellbeing of soils is crucial for securing food production worldwide. The soil health (SH) concept has been introduced due to an evolving understanding that soil is not just a growing medium for crops but that it provides a foundation for other essential ecosystem services (ES). The SH concept requires development of a holistic index for reliable and quantitative assessment of soil wellbeing related to the effects of different soil management practices and land uses. The aims of this paper are to: (1) review current approaches and methods to assess SH, (2) highlight the role of soil ES in characterizing soil function and (3) propose a new approach to assess SH via monitoring of ES provided by soils. We introduce a brief critical review of the following three main steps required for assessment of common SH indices: (1) selection of relevant attributes; (2) quantification and scoring approaches; and (3) integration of the selected attributes to construct the SH index. These steps usually include statistical or expert opinion-based approaches. In addition, we present a new approach that highlights the relevance and importance of soil ES, i.e., provisioning, regulating and supporting services that must be quantified for comprehensive assessment of soil functions and for fitting models that relate selected soil attributes to ES. This will allow practitioners and scholars to identify the most significant and universal attributes, quantify the relative contribution of each attribute to each ES, and subsequently assess the overall health of soils.

土壤的健康对确保全球粮食生产至关重要。由于人们不断认识到土壤不仅是农作物的生长介质，而且为其他基本生态系统服务（ES）奠定了基础，因此引入了土壤健康（SH）概念。SH概念要求开发一个整体指数，以可靠和定量地评估与不同土壤管理实践和土地利用的影响相关的土壤健康。该目标本文的目的是：（1）综述评估SH的当前方法和方法，（2）突出土壤ES在表征土壤功能中的作用，（3）提出一种通过监测土壤提供的ES评估SH的新方法。我们对评估通用SH指数所需的以下三个主要步骤进行了简要的批判性审查：（1）选择相关属性；（2）量化和评分方法；（3）整合所选属性以构建SH索引。这些步骤通常包括基于统计或专家意见的方法。此外，我们提供了一种新的方法来强调土壤ES的相关性和重要性，即供应，必须量化和量化的调节和支持服务，以全面评估土壤功能以及将所选土壤属性与ES相关联的拟合模型。这将使从业人员和学者能够确定最重要和最普遍的属性，量化每个属性对每个ES的相对贡献，然后评估土壤的整体健康状况。