The North American Project to Evaluate Soil Health Measurements was initiated with the objective to identify widely applicable soil health measurements for evaluation of agricultural management practices intended to improve soil health. More than 20 indicators were chosen for assessment across 120 long‐term agricultural research sites spanning from north‐central Canada to southern Mexico. The indicators being evaluated include common standard measures of soil, but also newer techniques of visible and near‐infrared reflectance spectroscopy, a smart phone app, and metagenomics. The aim of using consistent sampling and analytical protocols across selected sites was to provide a database of soil health indicator results that can be used to better understand how land use and management has affected the condition of soil ecosystem provisioning for agricultural biomass production and water resources, as well as nutrient and C cycling. The objective of this paper is to provide documentation of the overall design, and methods being employed to identify soil health indicators sensitive across agricultural management practices, pedologies, and geographies.

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介绍评估土壤健康状况的北美项目

发起了评估土壤健康状况的北美项目，其目的是确定广泛适用的土壤健康状况，以评估旨在改善土壤健康的农业管理实践。在从加拿大中北部到墨西哥南部的120个长期农业研究站点中，选择了20多个指标进行评估。被评估的指标包括土壤的常用标准量度，还包括可见光和近红外反射光谱的新技术，智能手机应用程序以及宏基因组学。在选定的地点使用一致的采样和分析协议的目的是提供土壤健康指标结果的数据库，该数据库可用于更好地了解土地使用和管理如何影响了农业生物质生产和水资源的土壤生态系统供应条件，以及养分和碳循环。本文的目的是提供有关总体设计的文档，以及用于识别对农业管理实践，教育和地域敏感的土壤健康指标的方法。