Soil is a complex and heterogeneous material. However, that complexity can make it a useful form of trace evidence in crime investigation. It is easily transferable - attaching, staining and smearing to inanimate objects, as well as to live and dead bodies - it is a potentially valuable asset for use in forensic analysis since its characteristics are affected by its origin, history, environment and management. However, largely due constraints of the current methodology of analysis, soil use as forensics tool is limited.

Soil provides an enormous phylogenetic and functional microbial diversity, with up to one billion cells and many thousands of bacterial species per gram. Soil bacterial communities also are affected by their environment, and have the ability to reflect the history of a given soil, thereby providing a unique and powerful tool for tracing soil origin. Soil evidence is often comparative: as soils differ in microbial content, a comparison of the communities inhabiting soils may reveals if samples from different scenes are derived from the same or from some other, unrelated, location.