Assessment of Soil Health in Urban Agriculture: Soil Enzymes and Microbial Properties

Assessment of Soil Health in Urban Agriculture: Soil Enzymes and Microbial Properties

Urban agriculture has been recently highlighted with the increased importance for recreation in modern society; however, soil quality and public health may not be guaranteed because of continuous exposure to various pollutants. The objective of this study was to evaluate the soil quality of urban agriculture by soil microbial assessments. Two independent variables, organic and inorganic fertili...

Response of Soil Properties and Microbial Communities to Agriculture: Implications for Primary Productivity and Soil Health Indicators

Agricultural intensification is placing tremendous pressure on the soil's capacity to maintain its functions leading to large-scale ecosystem degradation and loss of productivity in the long term. Therefore, there is an urgent need to find early indicators of soil health degradation in response to agricultural management. In recent years, major advances in soil meta-genomic and spatial studies ...

Preliminary assessment of microbial-based soil additives

Soil assessment for urban agriculture: a Vancouver case study

With the expansion of urban agriculture in many North American cities, there is a current need to evaluate the soil and urban environment to assess potential risks of metal contamination in urban grown food. In this study, a university farm, a community garden, and a brownfield located in Vancouver, BC were characterized with respect to soil metal concentrations, atmospheric deposition of metal...

Sustainable Agriculture, Soil Health, and Soil Organic Matter

The latter two principles protect the soil resource on which all food and fibre production ultimately depends. However, agricultural production systems differ from ‘natural’ or undeveloped systems in that they can be considered to be ‘leaky’ with respect to nutrients. This is inevitable, due to nutrient removal in harvested product, but inappropriate fertiliser management can exacerbate the ‘le...