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The Standard Operating Procedures of the Global Soil Laboratory Network (GLOSOLAN): a trigger to face emerging challenges on sustainable soil management worldwide

The availability of globally harmonized standard operating procedures (SOPs) will greatly enhance the ability to provide comparable data. Laboratories are nowadays asked to provide data for traditional services and for the payment of ecosystem services. To ensure the reliability and comparability of data, laboratories should use globally accepted SOPs and apply quality assurance and quality control procedures. The Global Soil Laboratory Network (GLOSOLAN) of the Global Soil Partnership, FAO was established in 2017 to harmonize soil analytical data while building and strengthening the analytical capacity of laboratories worldwide. According to the Global Soil Laboratory Assessment 2018, the few methods used to measure the most common soil parameters (e.g. CNPK) have a large number of modifications resulting in high levels of divergence. According to GLOSOLAN, the methods used by laboratories are the result of geographic isolation, historical circumstances, and technical and economic constraints. The adoption of a common SOP per soil parameter is currently difficult as laboratories select the SOPs to use considering the suitability of the method to their soils and local calibrations to plant response in individual environments. Still, commercially available SOPs are the result of top-down development processes that excluded some countries and regions, and their cost and language sometimes limit their accessibility and use. To overcome these barriers, GLOSOLAN has developed a bottom-up, inclusive approach to harmonize and publish its SOPs that actively involves all its members. When only 29 countries were involved in the ISO technical committee on soil (TC190), GLOSOLAN had 72 contributors from 51 countries in its SOP on Walkley and Black. Individual contributions are processed and harmonized by a dedicated working group that is tasked to write the SOP. Thereafter, the draft SOP is reviewed by a Review Panel, the GLOSOLAN technical committee, and (depending on the topic) experts from other GSP technical networks. GLOSOLAN proficiency tests validate the SOPs. Endorsed SOPs are published open access on the GLOSOLAN webpage in multiple languages including dialects. Up to now, GLOSOLAN has published about 40 SOPs for soil chemical, physical and biological parameters, and another 18 SOPs will be published in 2023. If laboratories’ engagement in GLOSOLAN activities continues at this pace, GLOSOLAN will be in the unique position to affirm its SOPs as the new standard to harmonize soil data globally. Whenever possible, GLOSOLAN encourages national governments to support soil laboratories in order to combine bottom-up and top-down movements for the benefit of all.

standard operating procedures, Global Soil Laboratory Network, soil analysis, soil properties, soil data harmonization, soil data comparability, decision-making.

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