Soil macrofauna as an indicator for evaluating soil based ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes

Soils participate in the provision of numerous ecosystem services of great importance for the maintenance of ecosystems and human societies. Physical and chemical soils properties sustain supporting ecosystem services like plant production and the infiltration and provision of clean water. Carbon sequestration is a regulating ecosystem service important for climate regulation. Soils are also home of a large biodiversity whose participation in soil processes is critical for their sustainable use. Evaluating these functions to assess the provision of ecosystem services is an important challenge for which simple and accurate tools and methodologies are requested. In this work, the relationship of the soil macro-fauna with some soil-based ecosystem services was evaluated in three different regions of Colombia, Brazil and Nicaragua with rather contrasted conditions of soils and management options. In each country, we calculated a set of sub-indicators of physical quality, chemical fertility, organic matter accumulation, soil macro aggregation and macro-invertebrate communities abundance and diversity. The combination of these sub indicators in a General Indicator of Soil Quality (GISQ) provided an overall assessment of the quality of the soil and associated ecosystem services. The strong relationship observed between macrofauna indicators and soil physical, chemical and organic matter characteristics makes it a powerful tool for evaluating and monitoring soil quality. •Macroinvertebrate communities are highly sensitive to soil conditions for the high diversity of adaptive strategies represented in the 10 to 15 orders regularly found in soils.•Soil based ecosystem services can be estimated with synthetic sub indicators of chemical fertility (support of plant production), physical quality (hydric services), morphology (erosion and flooding control) and climate regulation (via C sequestration).•Sub indicators of soil-based ecosystem services were all significantly correlated confirming that ecosystem services tend to covary.•Macroinvertebrate communities are significantly with all the sub indicators of soil quality and their value as indicators of ecosystem services is thus verified.