Soil biodiversity: An essential foundation for sustainable soil fertility

摘要

The major gains in global food production observed over the last five decades have been based on the sophisticated exploitation of advances in the fields of genetics, physiology and other plant sciences. By analogy the biological basis of soil management has until recently remained at the equivalent of a pre-Mendelian status. Recent advances in soil biology have however, now provided the basis for improved management of soil fertility through more explicit manipulation of soil biological populations and processes, a target which has become the mandate of the TSBF Programme (Woomer and Swift, 1994). Other recent reviews have evaluated the evidence for this progress in detail (Metting 1993; Pankhurst et al., 1994; Ritz et al., 1994; Cadisch and Giller, 1996). Our intention in this paper is to re-emphasize some aspects of the essential ecological foundation for such approaches and perhaps more importantly to draw attention to some of the practical implications.