AUTHOR=Giovannetti Marco , Salvioli di Fossalunga Alessandra , Stringlis Ioannis A. , Proietti Silvia , Fiorilli Valentina TITLE=Unearthing soil-plant-microbiota crosstalk: Looking back to move forward JOURNAL=Frontiers in Plant Science VOLUME=13 YEAR=2023 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2022.1082752 DOI=10.3389/fpls.2022.1082752 ISSN=1664-462X ABSTRACT=
The soil is vital for life on Earth and its biodiversity. However, being a non-renewable and threatened resource, preserving soil quality is crucial to maintain a range of ecosystem services critical to ecological balances, food production and human health. In an agricultural context, soil quality is often perceived as the ability to support field production, and thus soil quality and fertility are strictly interconnected. The concept of, as well as the ways to assess, soil fertility has undergone big changes over the years. Crop performance has been historically used as an indicator for soil quality and fertility. Then, analysis of a range of physico-chemical parameters has been used to routinely assess soil quality. Today it is becoming evident that soil quality must be evaluated by combining parameters that refer both to the physico-chemical and the biological levels. However, it can be challenging to find adequate indexes for evaluating soil quality that are both predictive and easy to measure