Stepping on invisible land: on the importance of communicating the value of soils.

Soils play fundamental roles in the functioning of the Earth's ecosystems. Despite numerous initiatives to protect soils, it continues to be generally perceived as dirt or, at best, the surface we walk on. To better understand soil perception by the public, we conducted a survey with 99 participants from Poland and Brazil. We applied opportunity sampling and conducted semi-structured interviews with 40 respondents from Poland and 30 from Brazil, and 29 unstructured interviews in Brazil. Most of the respondents (53%) of the semi-structured interviews associated soil with the surface where plants grow, while 27% said that it is the ground we step on. When asked about pro-environmental campaig…