The term "Soil Security" is used in the context of maintaining the quality and quantity of soil needed in order to ensure continuous supplies of food and fresh water for our society. Topics in this unique book on the management of soil sustainability in the Mediterranean region include: soil information, land degradation, land desertification, pedoenvironments, and the carbon cycle and sequestration. One main focus of the book is the description of new approaches that have been adapted with regards to interdisciplinary soil ecosystem management to combat and mitigate desertification. The contributing authors are renowned experts in their fields which cover the subjects on traditional as well as innovative land use and management.

This book introduces the concept of soil security and its five dimensions: Capability, Capital, Condition, Connectivity and Codification. These five dimensions make it possible to understand soil's role in delivering ecosystem services and to quantify soil resource by measuring, mapping, modeling and managing it. Each dimension refers to a specific aspect: contribution to global challenges (Capability), value of the soil (Capital), current state of the soil (Condition), how people are connected to the soil (Connectivity) and development of good policy (Codification). This book considers soil security as an integral part of meeting the ongoing challenge to maintain human health and secure our planet's sustainability. The concept of soil security helps to achieve the need to maintain and improve the world’s soil for the purpose of producing food, fiber and freshwater, and contributing to energy and climate sustainability. At the same time it helps to maintain biodiversity and protects ecosystem goods and services.

GlobalSoilMap: Basis of the global spatial soil information system contains contributions that were presented at the 1st GlobalSoilMap conference, held 7-9 October 2013 in Orléans, France. These contributions demonstrate the latest developments in the GlobalSoilMap project and digital soil mapping technology for which the ultimate aim is to produce a high resolution digital spatial soil information system of selected soil properties and their uncertainties for the entire world. GlobalSoilMap: Basis of the global spatial soil information system aims to stimulate capacity building and new incentives to develop full GlobalSoilMap products in all parts of the world.

Soil Health and Intensification of Agroecosystems examines the climate, environmental, and human effects on agroecosystems and how the existing paradigms must be revised in order to establish sustainable production. The increased demand for food and fuel exerts tremendous stress on all aspects of natural resources and the environment to satisfy an ever increasing world population, which includes the use of agriculture products for energy and other uses in addition to human and animal food. The book presents options for ecological systems that mimic the natural diversity of the ecosystem and can have significant effect as the world faces a rapidly changing and volatile climate. The book explores the introduction of sustainable agroecosystems that promote biodiversity, sustain soil health, and enhance food production as ways to help mitigate some of these adverse effects. New agroecosystems will help define a resilient system that can potentially absorb some of the extreme shifts in climate. Changing the existing cropping system paradigm to utilize natural system attributes by promoting biodiversity within production agricultural systems, such as the integration of polycultures, will also enhance ecological resiliency and will likely increase carbon sequestration. - Focuses on the intensification and integration of agroecosystem and soil resiliency by presenting suggested modifications of the current cropping system paradigm - Examines climate, environment, and human effects on agroecosystems - Explores in depth the wide range of intercalated soil and plant interactions as they influence soil sustainability and, in particular, soil quality - Presents options for ecological systems that mimic the natural diversity of the ecosystem and can have significant effect as the world faces a rapidly changing and volatile climate

Soil Carbon Storage: Modulators, Mechanisms and Modeling takes a novel approach to the issue of soil carbon storage by considering soil C sequestration as a function of the interaction between biotic (e.g. microbes and plants) and abiotic (climate, soil types, management practices) modulators as a key driver of soil C. These modulators are central to C balance through their processing of C from both plant inputs and native soil organic matter. This book considers this concept in the light of state-of-the-art methodologies that elucidate these interactions and increase our understanding of a vitally important, but poorly characterized component of the global C cycle. The book provides soil scientists with a comprehensive, mechanistic, quantitative and predictive understanding of soil carbon storage. It presents a new framework that can be included in predictive models and management practices for better prediction and enhanced C storage in soils. - Identifies management practices to enhance storage of soil C under different agro-ecosystems, soil types and climatic conditions - Provides novel conceptual frameworks of biotic (especially microbial) and abiotic data to improve prediction of simulation model at plot to global scale - Advances the conceptual framework needed to support robust predictive models and sustainable land management practices

The book focuses in detail on learning and adapting through partnerships between managers, scientists, and other stakeholders who learn together how to create and maintain sustainable resource systems. As natural areas shrink and fragment, our ability to sustain economic growth and safeguard biological diversity and ecological integrity is increasingly being put to the test. In attempting to meet this unprecedented challenge, adaptive management is becoming a viable alternative for broader application. Adaptive management is an iterative decision-making process which is both operationally and conceptually simple and which incorporates users to acknowledge and account for uncertainty, and sustain an operating environment that promotes its reduction through careful planning, evaluation, and learning until the desired results are achieved. This multifaceted approach requires clearly defined management objectives to guide decisions about what actions to take, and explicit assumptions about expected outcomes to compare against actual outcomes. In this edited book, we address the issue by pursuing a holistic and systematic approach that utilizes natural resources to reap sustainable environmental, economic and social benefits for adaptive management, helping to ensure that relationships between land, water and plants are managed in ways that mimic nature.