Impact of anthropic activities on soil quality under different land uses

Anthropization often leads to land use transformation, causing deep changes in soil properties and on its quality. Land use change could be an environmental and so-cioeconomic problem, as it impacts soil quality and ecosystem services. There is an ur-gent need to understand the pressures affecting soil quality. The aim of the work is to quantify the impact of different land uses on soil abiotic and biotic properties and on its quality. To achieve the aims, soils from different land uses (forest, urban and agri-cultural) were collected in the surroundings of Naples and analyzed for pH, water content, contents of C and N, C/N ratio and total and available concentrations of Cu, Ni and Pb, microbial and fungal biomasses, basal respiration and metabolic quotient. Then, a soil quality index (SQI) was calculated for each land use. The results showed that soil abiotic and biotic properties of the agricultural sites differed from those of forest and urban sites. At agricultural sites, microbial abun-dances decreased due to low amount of C and N and to high amount of Cu and Pb. This caused low use efficiency of energetic substrates and a reduced soil quality of ag-ricultural sites as compared to forest and urban sites.