How Reliable is Respiration as a Soil Health Metric?

Soil biology is central to the concept of soil health. However, measuring soil biology can be costly and difficult to translate into management recommendations. Mineralizable C (or respiration upon rewetting) has gained popularity as a soil health metric because it addresses both of these issues simultaneously. While this metric has been used extensively by researchers, more information is needed before extension agents and growers can use it reliability and in a standardized platform of soil health diagnostics.