Future Soil Issues

This chapter aims to address future soil issues from a specific viewpoint, namely the need of our country. It starts by analysing both Italy's physical landscape along with the social and economic structure and its population. From this basis, the chapter focuses on country limitations and potentialities and identifies the most important country-specific contributions by soil science aiming towards the well-being of Italy. We claim that future soil scientist must give major contributions in the followings: (1) spatial planning of the landscape (oriented to urban planning), (2) archaeology and natural heritage, (3) agriculture and forestry combining productivity and environmental protection, (4) hydrogeological risks, (5) integrated landscape management. In order to get these results, the authors anticipate that soil science requires a novel vision, novel approaches and most importantly a novel education combining in-depth specialized knowledge with a very good but broad and basic soil knowledge.