Soil Quality Assessment Is a Necessary First Step for Designing Urban Green Infrastructure

Ecological scales of indicator plants in an industrial region

The article presents the results of a long-term monitoring experiment (26 years) to identify indicator plants and their indices for assessing the state of ecosystems in the industrial region of Eastern Europe – Donbass. Ecological scales are discrete calculated or metric indicators that are important for quantification and examination of anropogenically transformed ecotopes. It is proposed to use four categories of ecological scales with a different mechanism for calculating the indices and different conditions of the experiment: 1) the principle of varying absolute metric parameters, 2) the calculated principle of correspondence of the percentage value; 3) the indices of the survival strategy implementation (vegetative and reproductive success); 4) the frequency of occurrence (or appearance) of characteristic features or the degree of specialization of functional discrete structures. Names of plant species of Donbass are given and their characteristics of variation are indicated in fractional 10-point scales.

Soil in the City: Sustainably Improving Urban Soils

Large tracts of abandoned urban land, resulting from the deindustrialization of metropolitan areas, are generating a renewed interest among city planners and community organizations envisioning the productive use of this land not only to produce fresh food but to effectively manage stormwater and mitigate the impact of urban heat islands. Healthy and productive soils are paramount to meet these objectives. However, these urban lands are often severely degraded due to anthropogenic activities and are generally contaminated with priority pollutants, especially heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Characterizing these degraded and contaminated soils and making them productive again to restore the required ecosystem services was the theme of the "Soil in the City- 2014" conference organized by W-2170 Committee (USDA's Sponsored Multi-State Research Project: Soil-Based Use of Residuals, Wastewater, & Reclaimed Water). This special section of comprises 12 targeted papers authored by conference participants to make available much needed information about the characteristics of urban soils. Innovative ways to mitigate the risks from pollutants and to improve the soil quality using local resources are discussed. Such practices include the use of composts and biosolids to grow healthy foods, reclaim brownfields, manage stormwater, and improve the overall ecosystem functioning of urban soils. These papers provide a needed resource for educating policymakers, practitioners, and the general public about using locally available resources to restore fertility, productivity, and ecosystem functioning of degraded urban land to revitalize metropolitan areas for improving the overall quality of life for a large segment of a rapidly growing urban population.