Terminology note: this is framed throughout as “regolith-based agriculture,” but the suitability criteria you’re screening for are pedological, not geological. “Regolith” just means unconsolidated material on bedrock, no matter how altered. “Soil” implies evidence of chemical weathering.
Two pieces of prior work back this up directly. Certini et al. (2020) argue explicitly for Mars that in situ data at Gusev, Meridiani and Gale show clear pedogenic signatures, and that “soil” is the more accurate term precisely because it signals pedological protocols are the right approach — not just geochemical survey. Lybrand (2023) makes the connection to this project even more directly: she frames “space agriculture” as one of three pillars linking soil science to planetary science, and notes that the Soil Science Society of America’s 2017 definition of soil was deliberately broadened (Van Es, 2017) to push back on the “implicit message that soil science would not be relevant outside planet Earth.” That’s directly relevant to how this framework gets positioned: calling it “soil suitability” rather than “regolith suitability” is what invites soil scientists (and their toolkit) into the conversation instead of leaving it purely geochemical.
Suggestion: keep “regolith” for the raw material description, switch to “soil” once you’re assessing pedogenic/agricultural suitability. Happy to help with that pass through the Introduction if useful.
References:
Certini, G., Karunatillake, S., Zhao, Y.-Y.S., Meslin, P.-Y., Cousin, A., Hood, D.R., Scalenghe, R. (2020). Disambiguating the soils of Mars. Planetary and Space Science, 186, 104922.
Lybrand, R.A. (2023). Connecting soils to life in conservation planning, nutrient cycling, and planetary science. Earth-Science Reviews, 237, 104247.
van Es, H. (2017). A new definition of soil. CSA News, 62(10), 20–21.