Healthy soils are critical to the health of ecosystems, economies, and human populations. Thus, it is widely acknowledged that soil health is important to quantify, both for assessment and as a tool to help guide management strategies. What is less clear is how soil health should actually be measured, especially considering that soil health is not exclusively a product of soil physical and chemical characteristics. Given their well-established importance to many aspects of soil health, microbes and microbial processes are often used as metrics of soil health with a range of different microbe-based metrics routinely used across the globe. Unfortunately, it is our opinion that many of these pre-existing microbial measurements are not easy to interpret and may not necessarily provide credible inferences about soil health status. Here we review the microbial indices used to assess or monitor soil health and discuss some of the broader issues associated with their use. We provide recommendations to more effectively guide and improve how microbial information could be used to yield relevant and actionable assessments of soil health.

健康的土壤对于生态系统，经济和人口的健康至关重要。因此，众所周知，土壤健康对量化很重要，无论是评估还是作为指导管理策略的工具。尚不清楚如何实际测量土壤健康，尤其是考虑到土壤健康并非仅是土壤理化特性的产物。鉴于微生物和微生物过程对土壤健康的许多方面都具有公认的重要性，因此经常将微生物和微生物过程用作土壤健康的指标，并在全球范围内广泛使用一系列基于微生物的指标。不幸的是，我们认为许多这些先前存在的微生物测量值不容易解释，并且不一定能提供有关土壤健康状况的可靠推断。在这里，我们回顾了用于评估或监测土壤健康的微生物指标，并讨论了与其使用相关的一些更广泛的问题。我们提供建议，以更有效地指导和改善如何使用微生物信息来进行土壤健康的相关且可行的评估。