Interactive web app

Explore the health of the forest soils in the Basque Country

January 10, 2025

You can explore the results of the assessment of soil health condition for the forest plantations of the Basque Country (Spain) with this interactive web app.

The web app is undergoing improvement as I try and learn new things with Shiny I will be adding more pieces to it, especially some maps, and making it prettier.

Now you can assess the soil healthy condition at the sampled plots BASONET monitoring network for sustainable forest management. With the app you can choose the percentiles of the distribution of soil indicator values under semi-natural forests (these are our reference soils) that will be used to calculate the threshold and the management target.

This is how the web app looks like, showing as an example the assessment for soil pH.

The thresholds determine whether of not the soils under plantation plots are considered "unhealthy" or "healthy". The management target is the value of the indicator that we would ideally reach with the appropriate intervention. If your soil is unhealthy, you also need intervention (and it would be more urgent) to improve the condition so it is not at risk of degradation.

In this web app we assess the condition of the soil with three indicators:

Soil Organic Carbon: Clay ratio as an indicator of carbon storage (or sign of SOC loss). Higher values indicate greater storage of carbon. But it is important to compare the ratio in areas that have a similar clay content, climatic conditions, and relief. That's why we do the assessment by soil monitoring unit.
pH as an indicator for the degradation process of acidification. Lower values in this case indicate more acidity. We want to keep the levels closer to the semi-natural forests. These can be already acidic, but we want to avoid that they go even lower.
Bulk density is an indicator of soil compaction. We don't want values to be too high, because it indicates that the soil is more compact, and this affects negatively many other properties (soil structure, aeration, water infiltration, root growth...).

the user can move the threshold and the target left or right, play and see how these values (that can be somewhat subjective) affect the proportion of plots that are classified as unhealthy.

This tool can be used to discuss with forest managers and policy-makers, as well as with the local community, what levels of the indicators we are willing to choose to perform the assessment of our forest soils.