Defining a framework to measure soil quality Joan Romanyà (1) , Isabel Serrasolses (2) & Ramon V. Vallejo (1,2) (1) Universitat de Barcelona (2) CEAM. Centro de Estudios Ambientales del Mediterráneo. Soil provides a list of services to all users of terrestrial ecosystems and is crucial to our agricultural societies. From an anthropogenic point of view, soil quality may be then measured in terms of the services the soil provides to our society. The value of soil services to human societies has changed during history and thus the value we give to soils has also changed over time as it depends upon the economic and cultural basis of a society for a given context. While throughout history human awareness of the soil services has been mainly reduced to food, fibre and bioenergy production, nowadays the list of soil services has largely increased (see Table 1) and we are beginning to realise that soil management is no longer a local but a global issue affecting not only food and goods supplies but also to the human welfare and health. In other words, this societal awareness of the multiple functions of soils is not limited to an specific land use but to the whole landscape. Over the last century, as a result of the world increasing population and soil products demand, soil use has been intensified throughout the world and have promoted great scale changes in land use (agricultural land abandonment and urban sealing in good lands in developed countries and deforestation in developing countries). In developed countries increased forest land has been allocated to protect the environmental quality (e.g. water catchments, biodiversity conservation, C sequestration). However, forest soils in developed countries occupy less or much less than a 40 % of the land, and suffer a dramatic reduction in the developing countries. In consequence, some authors have recently stated that the protection of environmental quality and human health should be extensive to all land uses including productive land as well (see Foley et al., 2005). In this context, to our point of view, land management and planning should consider the ability of soils to function under different land uses, the reversibility of any land use change and the multifunctionality of soils (productivity, environment and human health). In consequence, the evaluation of soil quality should address holistically the following three principles across all soil uses: 1. Food security (quality and quantity) 2. Environmental quality and biodiversity 3. Human health and welfare Although none of these principles is solely dependant on soils they are all very much related to soil functioning. Soil quality assessment Soil quality assessment typically includes the quantification of indicators that are often derived from reductionistic studies or general qualitative observations of the soil (Seybold et al., 1998). Overall, soil quality indicators condense the enormous complexity of the soil (Schjonning et al. 2004) in an attempt to describe the capacity of the soil to function. In spite soil quality indicators will not give a complete picture of the soil system we think they should attempt to cover, as much as possible, all soil functions