Soil health is a promising lens through which to approach land management, having the potential to serve as a descriptor of biophysical processes and as an effective communication tool across stakeholders. However, this potential has been largely unrealized due to difficulty in quantitatively assessing soil health and linking those assessments to outcomes. Here we discuss many multiple persistent obstacles to quantitative soil health assessment and outline a suite of analyses to help address those obstacles. Specifically, we propose a quantitative approach to developing and selecting soil health indicators that help connect management-induced changes in soil health to specific outcomes (e.g., yield or water quality). To demonstrate the utility of this approach, we perform a small case study using published data from North Carolina and New York cropping systems. Additionally, we outline how this approach is scalable and flexible enough to integrate future soil health metric development. The proposed approach stands to provide a quantitative, empirical basis for future measurement, assessment, and interpretation of soil health.

土壤健康是处理土地管理的一个有前途的镜头，有可能成为生物物理过程的描述和利益相关者之间的有效沟通工具。然而，由于难以定量评估土壤健康并将这些评估与结果联系起来，这一潜力在很大程度上尚未实现。在这里，我们讨论了定量土壤健康评估的许多长期障碍，并概述了一套分析来帮助解决这些障碍。具体来说，我们提出了一种开发和选择土壤健康指标的定量方法，该指标有助于将管理引起的土壤健康变化与特定结果（例如产量或水质）联系起来。为了证明这种方法的实用性，我们使用来自北卡罗来纳州和纽约种植系统的已发布数据进行了一项小型案例研究。此外，我们概述了这种方法如何具有足够的可扩展性和灵活性，以整合未来的土壤健康指标开发。所提出的方法将为未来土壤健康的测量、评估和解释提供定量的经验基础。