ABSTRACT
Maintaining soil health in dryland areas Pandi Zdruli, Centre International de Hautes Etudes Agronomiques Méditerranéennes (CIHEAM), Italy; and Claudio Zucca, International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), Morocco
1 Introduction
2 Formation and properties of dryland soil
3 Soil health in the drylands
4 Dryland soil research priorities
5 Options and solutions for dryland soil health improvement
6 Case study
7 Future trends
8 Conclusion
9 Where to look for further information
10 References
How healthy are the dryland soils? The ‘healthy’ concept is unavoidably linked with the other term known as soil quality (Karlen et al., 1997) involving various characteristics that summarize the inherited value of the soil, which is a very dynamic and complex ecosystem regulated by the interaction of physical, chemical and biological processes acting simultaneously. Therefore, maintaining soil health in dryland soils requires in the first place a profound investigation of their inherited properties including their intrinsic limitations.
