Soil quality can be inferred from some physical, chemical and biological soil indicators, and it may be changed under the influence of land use change. In this regard, in order to achieve sustainable management of lands, the soil quality indicators (SQI) should be studied and evaluated. The aim of this study was to compare soil quality indicators in agricultural and pasture land uses in some parts of Shandiz city, as a randomized complete block design at two different land uses including pasture and agriculture with three replications. 120 soil samples were collected from the surface soil (0-20 cm depth) of both land uses and 18 physical, biological and chemical properties were selected as Total Data Set (TDS). Then, ten features were selected as Minimum Data Set (MDS) using the Principle Component Analysis (PCA). Soil quality was evaluated using two cumulative quality indices, integrated quality index (IQI) and Nemero quality index (NQI) in these two datasets. The results showed that pasture land use had the highest value of NQI and IQI in both data sets compared to agricultural land use. The highest value of soil quality index was related to NQI in the minimum data set in pasture land use. The correlation coefficients for IQI between TDS and MDS for pasture and agricultural samples were 0.98 and 0.94%, respectively, and for the NQI were 0.88 and 0.82%, respectively. There was a significant difference (p <0.01) between the values of soil quality indices in both pasture and agricultural land used using both TDS and MDS, which indicates the use of MDS instead of TDS can be used to assess soil quality in the studied area. According to the results of this research it can be concluded that agricultural practices decrease soil quality.

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