Benchmarking soil multifunctionality

Wubs, E. R. Jasper

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-11-609-2025

Articles | Volume 11, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-11-609-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-11-609-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 2

Forum article

|

10 Sep 2025

Forum article |

| 10 Sep 2025

Benchmarking soil multifunctionality

E. R. Jasper Wubs

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Final revised paper (published on 10 Sep 2025)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 26 Sep 2024)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

CC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-2851', Bob Douma, 21 Oct 2024

Dear Dr. Wubs, dear Jasper,
Nice to read your paper in which you suggest to develop standardized metrics to characterize soil functioning. The approach developed by Daou & Shipley is very interesting and worth exploring further, in particular whether this concept of 'general soil fertility' works across the globe (for which you have made a nice attempt in the Netherlands) but also to what extent this idea can be extended to other soil functions. I am not expert on soils, but I am an expert on SEM/path modelling and my comments should be read with that in mind.
I have four major points to discuss:
1) Description of piecewiseSEM and SEM and d-sep test. Not all places this description is accurate and this could be improved.
2) Definitions used. You are using words like mechanisms, functions, services, processes and sometimes I got the impression that they are used interchangeably. I think that for quantifying soil functions/services definitions and termininology should be crystal clear.
3) The indicators in the measurement models are these really indicators of the latent variable, or are these causes (e.g. water holding capacity, repellency etc). And is the latent unambigious enough? For example "Climate regulation". This potentialy has many aspects and it is not entirely clear what you mean by this
4) To me soil health would be an interesting function to include. You could for example test this by growing four plant species on soil cores and inoculating those cores with various pathogens (either one by one, or a mixture of pathogens) and measure growth/survival of the plant species. You could extend this idea of using plants a phytometer even further by for example growing four species under standardized conditions, and measuring how different soils affect the decompsition rates under standardized conditions as a measure for carbon sequestration? And maybe you could design a good experiment along those lines for water holding capacity.
regards, Bob Douma

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-2851-CC1
- AC1:
  'Reply on CC1', E.R. Jasper Wubs, 23 Oct 2024
  Dear Dr. Douma, dear Bob,
  Thank you for your kind words and enthusiasm on this topic!
  In response:
  Thanks for highlighting this, also in our private communication, let’s have a meeting to iron out these mistakes. I want to get this right!
  
  You are right, I will go through the paper during the inevitable revisions and harmonize the terms used. Good point!
  
  I have to think carefully about that, but you are right to bring it up. I will revise accordingly.
  
  My definition of soil health, the continued capacity of soils to deliver ecosystem services, seems to be broader then yours. But indeed, including disease suppression in the tests is an appealing prospect. I do mention it in the discussion as a possibility. We have to loop how it complements with the primary production, because insofar as it deals with plant pathogens, their effect should already be reflected in the phytometer performance. As such the pathogens are a (negative) driver of primary production. Even more interesting maybe is to implement a screen for human or zoonotic diseases?
  
  Again, many thanks for your time and observations – this is highly appreciated and I will include them as much as possible in a revision of the paper.
  Best wishes,
  Jasper
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-2851-AC1
RC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-2851', Julien Demenois, 18 Nov 2024
Dear author,
I've read with great interest your Ms which offers stimulating thoughts on how to assess soil multifunctionnality and soil health. The topic is definitely timely and worth being considered for publication in SOIL. In particular, I've found interesting the concept approach of using LV.
I've however some major recommendations to improve it.
I would recommend to give an example of application of this approach with LV. So far, only one example is given for soil fertility, but the different soils functions mentioned in the Ms should be illustrated similarly

The practicability of the approach will definitely be a challenge especially in the global South. I would recommend to discuss this point more in depth

In the description of the soil sampling strategy, I've questionned myself on how practically speaking homogeneous soil monoliths will be selected. Which criteria should be taken into account to define homogeneous area : for instance soil type x land-use x climate ?

More references would be necessary in the outlook section where many questions are formulated but the scientific rationale behind each of them should be more justified

A review of the existing approaches to benchmark soil multifunctionnality would be necessary especially because there are several Soil Mission projects on this topic : Soil Health Benchmarks project (https://soilhealthbenchmarks.eu/), SOLO project (https://soils4europe.eu/) just to give 2 examples

Finally, I would recommend to shorten the Ms and avoid some digressions

I hope these comments will be helpful to revised the Ms.
Yours sincerely,
Julien Demenois
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-2851-RC1
- AC2:
  'Reply on RC1', E.R. Jasper Wubs, 03 Dec 2024
  Dear Julien Demenois
  Many thanks for your kind words and review. In response to your comments:
  That is indeed something I am planning to do, however, the idea of this paper was to get the concept out and then to leverage the wisdom of the soil science crowd before I/we start measuring for real. So it should be read more as a perspective paper than a research article.
  
  Thanks for pointing this out. Having worked in the global south this is on my mind a lot and indeed it can be more prominent in the paper. I find it a real struggle to come up with ‘good’ measurements that can be done also with less equipped labs. Any wisdom there is welcome!
  
  In general I would recommend to sample as small a space as possible so it is most likely to be homogeneous, and then to take replicate observations through the field and landscape of interest. For sure soil type, land use and climate need to be the same, but I think a finer level of detail is necessary to make the method worthwhile.
  
  Okay, I can do that.
  
  I can include a brief overview of what is there including ongoing projects.
  
  Okay, please indicate the digressions and I am happy to work on them.
  
  Sincerely,
  Jasper
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-2851-AC2
RC2:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-2851', Anonymous Referee #2, 20 Nov 2024

This is an interesting paper that proposes using structural equation modelling to help define soil health. It makes a strong argument for the approach and introduces the reader to the methodology with clearly worked through illustrations of how the method might work. However, this where I had a problem with the paper, as it never went on to apply the proposed method and illustrate its application with some results and then discuss them. For this reason I cannot recommend the paper for publication in SOIL and suggest that it is rejected.
I have specific comments which are included to help the author improve the paper:
L39 I don’t follow the reasoning behind this statement ‘Furthermore, soil biodiversity importantly contributes to climate change adaptation, by storing precipitation in soils (Lal, 2020).
L64. What are we looking for in Creamer et al 2022 and Vogel et al 2018?
L129 I don’t think SOIL has boxes. Also I am not sure the photograph of Sewall Wright adds very much.
L178 I get the irony, but not really appropriate in a scientific paper
L244 I don’t agree. Combining methods does not always lead to more accurate results. Combining a poor method with a good one leads to less accurate results.
L247 A reference is needed for the IQ test for soils.
L254 . I would avoid literary references that not everybody will get.
L258 figure 2 needs a significantly bfuller caption explaining the different shapes and colours
L265 What does the * refer to - presumably the figure caption. Incorporate into the caption rather than adding notes like this.
I stopped my detail review at this point as I realised the paper was never going to deliver any results and thus I would recommend a rejection.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-2851-RC2
- AC3: 'Reply on RC2', E.R. Jasper Wubs, 03 Dec 2024
  
  Dear reviewer,
  Many thanks for your viewpoint and comments. Indeed, I wrote the paper as a perspectives paper outlining the idea for the method. I did this because I think a good method to measure and quantify soil health is too complicated and too important to do in one go. Rather I aim to leverage the wisdom of the soil science crowd to improve the method before I/we start measuring in earnest.
  Many thanks for your detailed comments, I am happy to address those in a revision.
  Sincerely,
  Jasper Wubs
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-2851-AC3

Peer review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (28 Dec 2024) by Luis Merino-Martín

AR by E.R. Jasper Wubs on behalf of the Authors (12 Feb 2025) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (26 Feb 2025) by Luis Merino-Martín

RR by Julien Demenois (31 Mar 2025)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (31 Mar 2025)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The author clearly feels that presenting a methodology is enough for a perspective paper and, perhaps not surprisingly, disagrees with my initial review. I note that the other reviewers have a different opinion.

While I do agree that SEM and LVM offer an interesting approach to describing soil health, I remain concerned that the paper does not go far enough and that simply presenting an idea for a method or model is not sufficient. I am assuming this is a forum article, since SOIL does not have a ‘perspective ‘ article option. From the SOIL website:

"Forum articles should stimulate an open debate by presenting new ideas and views of soil as part of the larger Earth system. As such, they must strive to be a point of departure for future work. Purely speculative contributions are discouraged."

My concern is that this paper is not a point of departure for future work. There are already a number of existing papers which have tried to apply SEM to soil health assessments for example Maaz et al. (2023); Romero et al. (2024). These and other papers should have at least been reviewed and the advantages and disadvantages of the approaches that these have taken pointed out. SOIL’s readers need to understand how this paper builds on existing work and how it takes us forward beyond the state-of-art. Given the lack of references to previous use of SEM in soil health work I am struggling to understand this.

*Note. I have no scientific relationship to the authors of these papers
Maaz, T. M., Heck, R. H., Glazer, C. T., Loo, M. K., Zayas, J. R., Krenz, A., Beckstrom, T., Crow, S. E. & Deenik, J. L. 2023. Measuring the immeasurable: A structural equation modeling approach to assessing soil health. Science of the Total Environment, 870, 161900.

Romero, F., Labouyrie, M., Orgiazzi, A., Ballabio, C., Panagos, P., Jones, A., Tedersoo, L., Bahram, M., Guerra, C. A., Eisenhauer, N., Tao, D., Delgado-Baquerizo, M., García-Palacios, P. & van der Heijden, M. G. A. 2024. Soil health is associated with higher primary productivity across Europe. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 8, 1847-1855.

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ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (08 Apr 2025) by Luis Merino-Martín

AR by E.R. Jasper Wubs on behalf of the Authors (23 May 2025) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (10 Jun 2025) by Luis Merino-Martín

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (10 Jun 2025) by Rémi Cardinael (Executive editor)

AR by E.R. Jasper Wubs on behalf of the Authors (16 Jun 2025) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Soil health is of critical importance, and many soils are threatened. Benchmarking sustainable soil management is a challenge as there is no comprehensive indicator set. Here, I introduce a novel conceptual approach to soil health, representing soil functions as complex and hard-to-measure variables. I outline a new methodology to study soil health using latent-variable models to represent soil functions. This is a new starting point for soil health research and ultimately monitoring.