Integrating Microbiological quality indicators and soil properties through score functions to assessment land uses change in Colombian andisols.

The individual interpretation of microbial indicators of soil functionality is often confusing. In addition, the high cost of measuring some of the indicators limit the studies oriented to provide early warnings of changes in soil functionality. We propose a methodology for integrating variables with scoring functions to evaluate the capacity of a set of basic microbial indicators, soil properties and environmental variables (with low measurement cost) to value the functionality of agricultural, mining and undisturbed soils. Based on samples taken from Andisol soils in the northeast of the department of Antioquia, Colombia, we found that microbial indicators contribute 34.77 percent of the variation to the entire set of data evaluated and that microbial respiration is the most important factor. Likewise, we observe that the nonlinear scoring equations, are efficient and more sensitive to discriminate the functionality in each of the land uses studied.