Humusica - Soil biodiversity and global change

Born in Trento (Italy, 2003) for standardizing vocabulary and units of humus form classification, after publishing a first synthetic classification e-book (Zanella et al., 2011), the Humus group decided to use its classification for facing global change (Zanella and Ascher-Jenull, 2018). The classification was detailed in many scientific articles published in three special issues (Humusica 1, 2 and 3) of the journal Applied Soil Ecology. The main seven ideas that supported the whole Humusica project are briefly presented here:soil covers all planet Earth surfaces (soil as the seat of processes of organic matter storage and recycling);soil is only a biogenic structure (with a debate about the definition of the word “soil”);soil may be involved in the process of natural evolution (through a process of organism’ recycling of biomass after death);agricultural soils correspond to simplified natural soils (comparison between natural and agricultural soils);TerrHum, an appeal for classifying forest humipedons worldwide (a first attempt to use a smart cell phone as a field manual for humus form classification).Organic waste and agricultural soils.Is traditional agriculture economically sustainable? Comparing past traditional (1947) and today intensive farm practices in the Venice province of Italy