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Cited by 543

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 60 of the 60 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

How microbes can, and cannot, be used to assess soil health

Open access
Fierer, Noah, Wood, Stephen A., Bueno de Mesquita, Clifton P.·2021·Soil Biology and Biochemistry

Abstract

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.

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Metadata

Authors
Fierer, N., Wood, S. A., & Bueno de Mesquita, C. P.
Venue
Soil Biology and Biochemistry
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2021-02
Volume
153
Pages
108111
ISSN
0038-0717 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3112920764
Cited by
543
References
60
FWCI
32.34
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How microbes can, and cannot, be used to assess soil health. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.soilbio.2020.108111
The paper
Fierer, N., Wood, S. A., & Bueno de Mesquita, C. P. (2021). How microbes can, and cannot, be used to assess soil health. Soil Biology and Biochemistry. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soilbio.2020.108111

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