A review of soil nematodes as biological indicators for the assessment of soil health

Abstract

Healthy soils are essential for sustainable agricultural development and soil health requires careful assessment with increasing societal concern over environmentally friendly agricultural development. Soil health is the capacity of soil to function within ecological boundaries to sustain productivity, maintain environmental quality, and promote plant and animal health. Physical, chemical and biological indicators are used to evaluate soil health; the biological indicators include microbes, protozoa and metazoa. Nematodes are the most abundant metazoa and they vary in their sensitivity to pollutants and environmental disturbance. Soil nematode communities are useful biological indicators of soil health, with community characteristics such as abundance, diversity, community structure and metabolic footprint all closely correlated with the soil environment. The community size, complexity and structure reflect the condition of the soil. Both free-living and plant-parasitic nematodes are effective ecological indicators, contributing to nutrient cycling and having important roles as primary, secondary and tertiary consumers in food webs. Tillage inversion, cropping patterns and nutrient management may have strong effects on soil nematodes, with changes in soil nematode communities reflecting soil disturbance. Some free-living nematodes serve as biological models to test soil condition in the laboratory and because of these advantages soil nematodes are increasingly being used as biological indicators of soil health.

Keywords

biological indicators / community characteristics / soil health / soil nematodes

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFD0202102, 2016YFD0200405, and 2016YFE0101100).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Qiaofang Lu, Tongtong Liu, Nanqi Wang, Zhechao Dou, Kunguang Wang, and Yuanmei Zuo declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2020. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)