Assessing potential soil ecosystemic services in urban green areas from measurements of soil properties : insight from the URBSERSOl project

Assessing potential soil ecosystemic services in urban green areas from measurements of soil properties : insight from the URBSERSOl project.
Sustainable soil management includes supporting multiple ecosystem services. Holistic approaches are needed to properly evaluate the effects of practices on the multiple soil functions underlying ecosystemic services that soils can deliver.
Compared to other environments, urban soils are usually considered less for their productive capacity than supporting and regulating services. However, increasing demands for local resources creates competition between land uses for every space in urban and periurban areas.
Valuation of soil ecosystemic services often relies on expert-based matrices linking land use units to ecosystemic matrices. In limited cases, the soil functions are explicitely used as the elements to quantify as the soil contribution to ecosystemic services. These kinds of approaches either do not separate soil from its actual use (park, garden, spruce forest...), barely distinguish broad soil categories (well-drained soils versus gleysols, ...), or rely on indicators that are not directly linked to soil properties (yield, nature of vegetation...). Moreoever, they usually consider actual services rather than potential.
The URBSERSOL project aims at developping a methodology to assess the specific contribution of soil on potential ecosystemic services of urban green areas based on the evaluation of soil properties and the identification of indicators.
A field survey was conducted on three study areas in order to first identify the dominant soil types in urban environment and quantify soil properties. A methodological flowchart of data interpretation and indicator agregation was then elaborated for the big categories of services depending on soil. The main lessons from the project will be presented.

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