Tech Talk: Intro to Urban Soil Health for Conservation Planning and Management

In this webinar, Josh Beniston, NRCS Regional Soil Health Specialist covering urban areas, presents an overview of soil health in the context of urban soils. Josh walks through the aspects of urban soils may be different than rural agricultural soils and discusses the additional questions and observations that should be addressed for conservation planning in urban soils. The information in the presentation follows the topics that are presented in a new series of technical notes from the NRCS Soil Health Division. Specific topics in the presentation include:

• Basics of urban soil health: current understanding on classification, unique properties, and resource concerns commonly found in urban soils
• Site evaluation for urban soil health: background investigation of urban sites for conservation planning, tools for field evaluation of urban soils, and laboratory testing of urban soils
• Conservation practices for urban soil health: discuss the small-scale application of several NRCS conservation practices with the potential to improve urban soils