Soil quality monitoring in New Zealand: practical lessons from a 6-year trial

New Zealand operated two soil quality-monitoring programmes between 1995 and 2001 to test methods and provide data about sustainable land use for state of the environment reporting. The objective of this paper is to report on the strengths and weaknesses in the programmes to assist others wishing to set up monitoring programmes. The New Zealand programmes required the voluntary participation of the 16 autonomous regional authorities that have the legal responsibility for environmental monitoring at a regional scale, the support from the Ministry for the Environment, which has responsibility for reporting at the national scale, and agreement between participants and science providers on design. funding. data interpretation and reporting. Emphasis was towards the chemical, biological and physical characteristics of the soil. rather than contamination or erosion. The initiative was partially successful in that 10 of the 16 regional authorities participated in the project: a sampling strategy and minimum dataset were defined; an interpretive framework for assessing soil quality was established based on land use and soil order categories, and soil quality assessed at over 500 sites. Recommendations to establish small-scale national soil quality monitoring schemes include having a small number of low-cost indicators, a strong interpretive framework, standardised methods and sampling, and centralised storage of data and samples. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.