Establishing Reference Systems on Soil Quality: Example of the “ReQuaSud” Laboratory Network in Wallonia – Belgium

Soil quality is a central concern regarding sustainable multifunctionnality of cultivated and natural territories : food and non-food biomass production, environmental and ecosystemic services… Quality indicators and reference levels are needed in order to evaluate the state of the soil resources from a given land, for land-use planning or and to detect any temporal evolution. Our department has been involved for years in the implementation of substantial databases about soil quality in the Walloon region. The communication aims at sharing our experience in the establishment of soil evaluation references and tools, geographic databases, time monitoring, analysis networking, applied to the questions of soil fertility and soil contaminations.
The Requasud network is a regional initiative aiming at harmonizing the methods for soil sampling, analysis, and interpretation. We will present how 20 years of applied research led to the sound implementation of a dataset of more than 200,000 samples in cultivated fields all across Wallonia, and where are the remaining questions and needs for future research. Discussions should then focus to comparisons with the situations encountered by the participants to the Workshop.