How do we account for soil biodiversity and change to assess soil condition for the delivery of ecosystem services?

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Soils provide important functions for life, producing food, filtering water, recycling waste and regulating climate. Maintaining functionality requires that we understand how best to manage our environmental resources, which are used in human economic activity. Moreover, we need to understand how ecosystems provide benefits to society, e.g. through biodiversity and determine how to account for and value this in decision making. Much of our decision making is based on economic indicators, like gross domestic product (GDP) at national levels. These economic indicators are widely used to assess economic activity, but, they don't account for nature the use of nature, nor the benefits we get from natures services. GDP does not deduct the direct cost of the depletion of natural resources on national income, nor does it take into account the impact that our resource extraction has on the continued functioning of the earth system for life support. Therefore, as well as protecting nature, we need new approaches to identify benefits derived from biodiverse ecosystems as well as incorporating more of our natural resource use into policy and economic thinking. This research project addresses the deficiency in GDP by developing new and innovative ways to assess soil and ecosystem biodiversity, and how soils change in response to management in a national agri-environment context. We will use the new United Nations GDP satellite accounting system adopted in 2013, the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA), as a guiding framework. Within this we will analyze the unique Glastir agri-environment monitoring data for soils and ecosystems to understand linkages between above and below ground soil and ecosystem condition. We will identify relationships that can be used as indicators within accounting frameworks to report on the state and change of soil ecosystems. All of this work will contribute toward a better understanding of the value of our natural assets.