An user friendly tool to assess the effects on agricultural soils of different practices: the QBS-ar index

The QBS-ar index was proposed in Italy nearly 20 years ago as a biotic index aimed at biological quality assessment of soils based on their microarthropod communities composition and diversity. It is user friendly and quite expeditious. Therefore, since its introduction, it was applied in many natural and anthropogenic terrestrial environments in order to assess the impact of different forms of disturbance. QBSar resulted a reliable and sensitive tool for environmental monitoring in most of the contexts in which it was used. In particular, in a wide range of crops (like maize, apple, citrus, vineyards) it proved to be an useful index to distinguish among different management practices (conventional, no tillage, organic, green manure, etc.). In this paper, the principles on which the QBS-ar index is based are summarized and some examples from literature on its application in agroecosystems are reviewed.