Abstract

On the scale of human generations, the soil is a non-renewable natural resource that provides fundamental ecosystem services for life on earth, therefore, it is necessary to develop tools that allow to recover and maintain soil functions under sustainable conditions for both, agricultural and undisturbed ecosystems. In this context, the regulation of land use to sustain the potential productivity of agroecosystems becomes essential. Until now, the assessment of the sustainability of soil resources based on their fragility had not been sufficiently studied. We hypothesize that soils have a fragility threshold, which is defined by two boundary conditions: i) soil fragility where resilience is not possible and any anthropic intervention generates a significant decrease in one or several soil functions, e.g. through sealing, resulting in a "point of no return" and the system becomes unstable, and ii) soil fragility where resilience is possible to any anthropic intervention e.g. intensive compaction, and its return to the productive potential reached will be progressively lower and the system will stabilize once soil functions are balanced. Furthermore, an approach on how to manage soil resources to avoid their degradation over time needs quantifiable tools that are made available to farmers, researchers, and institutions. We believe that it is critical to develop a soil fragility index for individual agricultural and undisturbed ecosystems because those indices, applied to the agricultural sector, would allow regulating the sustainable use of soils based on their functions within ecosystems