The “Observatoire de 1a Qualité des Sols”: an example of ecosystem monitoring

Abstract

In the beginning of the eighties, a blurred feeling of an increase of soil degradations in consequence of intensive farming, industrial and urban activities and road traffic, coexisted with the precise knowledge of some severe but local situations (pollutions due to trace-elements -lead, cadmium,⋯-, spectacular erosions⋯). As a matter of fact, soil degradations remain insidious for a long time but are generally irreversible at human life scale: when they clearly appear, it is already too late.