On soil health and the pivotal role of sensing

Abstract. Soil underpins the functioning of all terrestrial ecosystems and human societies, yet its accelerating degradation demands urgent action. Sustainable soil management is essential to prevent further degradation and achieve sustainable land use. Many countries and supranational organisations have embraced the concept of soil health and integrated it into policy, but critical gaps persist in how soil health is assessed and implemented in practice. Clear operational procedures are needed to consistently evaluate soil health, communicate transparently with policymakers and stakeholders, and ensure that management decisions respect both the ecological functioning of soils and the services they provide to society. Soil health is often framed either from an ecological perspective, emphasising soil processes and functions, or from a socio-economic perspective, emphasising ecosystem services and productivity. Treating these perspectives in isolation has led to policies and agronomic practices that prioritise short-term outputs while neglecting the ecological principles that sustain soil systems, especially in managed landscapes. Here, soil health is instead approached as a property of the soil system that is central to both natural and socio-cultural domains: assessments consistently apply ecological understanding of soil processes and functions, whether soils are in natural ecosystems or in intensively managed agroecosystems. Conventional soil analysis alone cannot provide the continuous, spatially explicit information needed for timely and effective soil health evaluation because it is slow, costly, and spatially limited. Modern technologies such as soil and remote sensing, statistical modelling, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) are therefore not merely valuable additions but the only feasible means of generating rapid, affordable, precise, and scalable soil information across diverse ecosystems. Here, we review the conceptualisation of soil health, criteria for selecting indicators, current assessment frameworks, and the use of modern technologies to overcome operational constraints. Most published studies on soil health focus on agriculture, yet current environmental challenges demand a broader perspective that includes other ecosystems and land uses. We propose an integrative framework that explicitly links two complementary perspectives on the soil system: (1) its ecological integrity, captured by the physical, chemical and biological processes and functions that sustain it, and (2) the ecosystem services and societal benefits that arise when these functions operate within natural and managed landscapes. The framework integrates soil and remote sensing with advanced analytical approaches, such as statistical modelling, ML, and AI, enabling objective, quantitative, reliable, rapid, cost-effective, and scalable soil health assessments. By consistently applying ecological principles to soils in both natural and socio-cultural contexts, and then interpreting the resulting assessments in terms of ecosystem services and societal goals, this sensing-enabled framework supports soil management and policy that advance both environmental stewardship and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).