Soil quality BeonNAT

For quantifying the marginality of the BeonNAT test fields soil quality was assessed for each site. A well-suited instrument for this assessment is provided by the Muencheberg Soil Quality Rating tool (MSQR) (Mueller et al., 2007). This tool assesses soil quality by means of a number of indicators representing potential constraints for agriculture. The SQR tool valuates a number of soil and general environmental site properties (both physical and chemical soil parameters and other site factors like topography and climate) which can be easily assessed during field work and further refined by later laboratory analyses. Refer to Mueller et al. (2007) for details of the assement methodology.

The data set provides the results of the soil analyses carried out for each BeonNAT test site and needed site characteristics. The derived scores for all MSQR Basic and Hazard Indicators as well as the Hazard Indicators Multipliers are given along with the final MSQR scores.

Mueller, L., Schindler, U., Behrendt, A., Eulenstein, F. & Dannowski, R. (2007): The Muencheberg Soil Quality Rating. Field manual for detecting and assessing properties and limitations of soils for cropping and grazing. Leibniz-Zentrum für Agrarlandschaftsforschung (ZALF), Müncheberg, 1st Draft, Nov. 2007
(available online at: http://www.zalf.de/de/forschung_lehre/publikationen/Documents/Publikation_Mueller_L/field_mueller.pdf)