Natural England monitors soils on the 37 core sites that make up the Long Term Monitoring Network. This programme of monitoring takes place on a rolling programme of between 9 and 4 sites per year and, having started in 2011, the programme has just completed its first baseline monitoring of all sites in 2016.
Monitoring our soils can help give us insight into how soils work, how soil characteristics are related to each other and how soil conditions differ between different habitats. It should help us identify if inexpensive simple soil measurements be used as reliable indicators for more expensive complex measurements. Future monitoring should help us to understand whether changes in soil properties can be related to changes in land management, climate and pollutant deposition, and enable us to identify the most sensitive indicators of these changes in the soil.