Articles | Volume 11, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-11-193-2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-11-193-2025
Peer-reviewed comment
 | 
06 Feb 2025
Peer-reviewed comment |  | 06 Feb 2025

On the risks of good intentions and poor evidence – comment on “Back to the future? Conservative grassland management can preserve soil health in the changing landscapes of Uruguay” by Säumel et al. (2023)

José Paruelo, Luis López-Mársico, Pablo Baldassini, Felipe Lezama, Bruno Bazzoni, Luciana Staiano, Agustin Nuñez, Anaclara Guido, Cecilia Ríos, Andrea Tommasino, Federico Gallego, Fabiana Pezzani, Gonzalo Camba Sans, Andrés Quincke, Santiago Baeza, Gervasio Piñeiro, and Walter Baethgen
Note on duplicated preprint: although EGUsphere's policy does not support double preprinting, this preprint has also been posted on OSF Preprints in parallel to the EGUsphere preprint.

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Cited articles

Altesor, A., Gallego, F., Ferrón, M., Pezzani, F., López-Mársico, L., Lezama, F., Baeza, S., Pereira, M., Costa, B., and Paruelo, J. M.: Inductive approach to build state-and-transition models for Uruguayan Grasslands, Rangeland Ecol. Manag., 72, 1005–1016, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rama.2019.06.004, 2019. 
Baeza, S. and Paruelo, J. M.: Land use/land cover change (2000–2014) in the Rio de la Plata grasslands: An analysis based on MODIS NDVI time series, Remote Sensing, 12, 381, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12030381, 2020. 
Baeza, S., Rama, G., and Lezama F.: Cartografía de los pastizales naturales en las regiones geomorfológicas de Uruguay predominantemente ganaderas. Ampliación y actualización, in: Bases ecológicas y tecnológicas para el manejo de pastizales II, edited by: Altesor, A., López-Mársico, L., and Paruelo, J. M., FPTA - INIA, Montevideo, 26–47, ISBN 978-9974-38-412-5, 2019 (in Spanish). 
Baeza, S., Vélez-Martin, E., De Abelleyra, D., Banchero, S., Gallego, F., Schirmbeck, J., Veron, S., Vallejos, M., Weber, E., Oyarzabal, M., Barbieri, A., Petek, M., Guerra Lara, M., Sarrailhé, S. S., Baldi, G., Bagnato, C., Bruzzone, L., Ramos, S., and Hasenack, H.: Two decades of land cover mapping in the Río de la Plata grassland region: The MapBiomas Pampa initiative, Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment, 28, 100834, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rsase.2022.100834, 2022. 
Baldassini, P., Baethgen, W., Camba-Sans, G. H., Quincke, A., Pravia, M. V., Terra, J., Macedo, I., Piñeiro, G., and Paruelo, J. M.: Carbon stocks and potential sequestration of Uruguayan soils. A road map to a comprehensive characterization of temporal and spatial changes to assess Carbon footprint, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 7, 1045734, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2023.1045734, 2023. 
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Short summary
In this article, we make comments on some methodological issues and on the general approach of the paper Back to the future? Conservative grassland management can preserve soil health in the changing landscapes of Uruguay  (Säumel et al., 2023; https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-9-425-2023). We identified several design and methodological problems in the aforementioned publication that may induce potential misinterpretations. 
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