Evaluation of the environmental impact of agricultural management practices using soil microarthropods

The management of agricultural land includes a vari-ety of agronomic practices that can affect physical, chemi-cal and biological properties of soil. Soil bioindicators can be very useful to detect changes in soil quality, and among them soil fauna can be profitably applied to monitor the soil health status. Different groups of soil invertebrate are used as bioindicators or biotests; in some cases the biologi-cal indicators are represented by a single taxon, while in other cases the entire microarthropod community is as-sessed. In this study, the evaluation of different agronomic regimen has been realized using the QBS indexes (arthro-pods and collembola) and Folsomia candida test. The QBS results showed the expected seasonal variation and were more affected by soil characteristics than agronomic regi-men, with the lowest values recorded by the byodinamic farm; also the Folsomia candida tests gave similar results.