Abstract

Environment Waikato (EW) participated in two national soil quality monitoring projects from 1995–2001. The two projects co-funded from the Ministry for the Environment Sustainable Management Fund (SMF), identified methods and protocols for soil quality monitoring. The projects ceased in June 2001, but EW has continued to sample new sites and resample previously sampled sites each year to determine the extent and direction of changes in soil condition. Soil quality analysis using the same protocols has also been followed by several other regional councils.

The EW staff with responsibility for land resources selected 24 sites (nine new sites and 15 previously sampled sites) for sampling. Samples were supplied to Landcare Research for analyses using a standard set of soil chemical, physical and biochemical characteristics as defined under the 500 Soils Project protocols, and interpretation. Data from these samples were added to the EW soil quality database, which now consists of 137 sites. A brief summary of sites sampled this year and interpretation on the whole dataset is presented in this report.

Soil Quality in the Waikato Region 2008 [PDF, 373 KB]

Contents
	Summary	1
1.	Introduction	4
1.1.	Background	4
2.	Objectives	4
3.	Methods	4
3.1.	Soil sampling	4
3.2.	Soil quality measurements	5
3.3.	Analyses	5
	Biochemical properties	5
	Chemical properties	5
	Physical properties	5
3.4.	Data presentation	5
3.5.	Target Ranges	6
4.	Results	8
4.1.	Soils and sites	8
5.	Discussion	14
5.1.	Soil quality of sites sampled in 2008/09	14
5.2	Overall soil quality	14
5.3	Soil quality by land area	18
5.4	Changes in soil quality since previous sampling	20
5.5	Summary	22
6.	Conclusions	22
7.	Recommendations	23
8.	Acknowledgements	23
9.	References	23
	Appendices	26

Soil Quality in the Waikato Region 2008

Abstract

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