Quality of forest soils facing global changes

Positioned as an interface in the environment, soils constantly exchange flows with four major components of the environment: the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere and the lithosphere. At the interface of the living world and of the mineral world, soils are characterised by their extraordinary complexity: they combine the three phases – solid, liquid and gas – they have a very large variability of organo-mineral associations from complex biological and physico-chemical processes, a level of micro-biodiversity that still remains largely unknown, highly diverse pedogeneses, etc.