Soil Enzyme:Concepts and Relevance in Soil Health and Productivity

Soil is an important natural resource that needs to be preserved and, if possible its quality and productive capacity improved. Because of the conflicting pressure increasingly applied to the soil, it is clear that relevant indicators are urgently needed to assess and monitor soil health. Biological indicators of soil health offer certain advantage over physico chemical methods. Among the various biological indicators to monitor soil health, soil enzyme activities have great potential to provide a unique integrative biological assessment of soils and the possibility of assessing the health of the soil biota. Some enzyme activities could be used as a sensitive indicator of fertility status and soil pollution by heavy metals and other trace elements. Besides, soil enzyme activities provide an easy, relatively rapid and low cost procedure to monitor soil health. Nevertheless, soil enzyme activities also present some limitations and must always be considered in conjunction with other biological and physicochemical measurements of we are to diagnose soil health correctly.