QBS-ar VS QBS-e: a comparison of their performance on arable land under differentmanagement practices

According to the European Green Deal, policies aimed at conserving biodiversity should include not only natural but also agricultural areas, which cover more than half of Europe's land surface and where farming practices are recognized as a major cause of the loss of wildlife species, especially invertebrates. Proposals for more sustainable agricultural systems have been advanced, the implementation of which also requires an assessment of efficiency in agronomic, economic and ecological terms. With regard to this last aspect, soil is a key element of the landscape estimated to host about than 60% of the planet's biodiversity, and its monitoring and safeguard should therefore be of utmost importance. Several methods are currently applied to determine the biological status of soils, based on the analysis of different soil taxa. Among these, arthropods and earthworms, part of the meso- and macrofauna, have been shown to be particularly responsive to soil disturbance in agroecosystems. In Italy, these taxa formed the basis for the development of two soil biological quality indices, namely QBS-ar(thropods) and QBS-e(arthworms), which involve the assignment of scores to the collected individuals according to their functional adaptations to soil life and thus their sensibility to soil alterations. In this study, for the first time, such indexes have been applied together on arable land managed with different techniques (strip cropping and pure stand), with the aim of comparing the outcome of the two indices. A total of 18 soil samples for arthropods and earthworms each were collected in April 2023, along with soil chemical and physical data. After identification of specimens and calculations, statistics were applied to check for trends among QBS-ar and QBS-e and the other parameters. The two indexes are not correlated in this study, although they can be explained by different environmental variables: earthworms appear to be more sensible to chemical gradients, such as those due to fertilization, whereas the distribution of microarthropods revealed to be mostly associated to crop and management type, and spatial patterns (i.e. slope). Despite a relatively small sample size and a study area influenced by multiple factors, these results offer promising information for the selection of the soil biological index appropriate to specific contexts and objectives.