Using soil sustainability and resilience concepts to support future land management practice: A case study of Mt Grand Station, Hāwea, New Zealand

Abstract

Soil acts as the integrator of processes operating within the biological and hydrological landscapes and responds to external disturbances and processes on varying time scales. The impact of any change results in a corresponding response in the system; which is dependent on the resistance of the soil system to the disturbance. Irreversible permanent change results when the soil system shifts over a threshold tipping point; with the soil system experiencing a regime shift with associated structural and functional collapse. Climate change is the most important external disturbance or stressor on these systems due to changes in precipitation, temperature and moisture regimes. Our research at Mt Grand is focused on approaches to increasing land use resiliency in the face of environmental change. Our purpose is to select and apply soil quality indices which can be used to assess soil resilience to external disturbance events for Mt Grand Station in New Zealand. We will identify biophysical variations and landscape drivers in soil resilience; and use these results to match land management practices with variations in soil resilience. For example, soils with low resilience will only have land management practices that have a low impact on the soil resource. We selected soil attributes that represented indicators of resistance, used to quantify the capacity of a soil to recover its functionality. We mapped this soil resilience framework against a national database of soil and landscape attributes for Mt Grand Station. The output from this research is to posit a conceptual framework of soil quality indices which relates to soil resilience, and thus to create a spatial map of soil resilience for Mt Grand Station.