Evaluation of soil quality using multiple lineal regression based on physical, chemical and biochemical properties.

The aim of this work is to obtain an expression using multiple lineal regressions (MLR) to evaluate environmental soil quality. We used four forest soils from Alicante province (SE Spain), comprising three Mollisols and one Entisol, developed under natural vegetation with minimum human disturbance, considered as reference soils of high quality. We carried out MLR integrating different soil physical, chemical and biochemical properties, and we searched those regressions with Kjeldahl nitrogen (N(k)), soil organic carbon (SOC) or microbial biomass carbon (MBC) as predicted parameter.