Evaluation of the Environmental Impact of Agricultural Management Practices Using Soil Microarthropods

The management of agricultural land includes a variety of agronomic practices that can affect physical, chemical and biological properties of soil. Soil bioindica-tors can be very useful to detect changes in soil quality, and among them soil fauna can be profitably applied to monitor the soil health status. Different groups of soil invertebrate are used as bioindicators or biotests; in some cases the biological indicators are represented by a single taxon, while in other cases the entire microarthropod community is as-sessed. In this study, the evaluation of different agronomic regimen has been realized using the QBS indexes (arthropods and collembola) and Folsomia candida test. The QBS results showed the expected sea-sonal variation and were more affected by soil characteristics than agronomic regimen, with the lowest values recorded by the byodinamic farm; also the Folsomia candida tests gave similar results.JRC.H.7-Land management and natural hazard