Understanding Soil Change: Soil Sustainability over Millennia, Centuries, and Decades

by Daniel D. Richter, Jr , Daniel Markewitz , Foreword by William A. Reiners , Pedro Sánchez

• ISBN13: 9780521039437
• ISBN10: 0521039436
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Across the world, soils are managed with an intensity and at a geographic scale never before attempted, yet we know remarkably little about how and why managed soils change through time. Understanding Soil Change explores a legacy of soil change in south-eastern North America, a region of global ecologic, agricultural and forestry significance: from the acidic soils of primary hardwood forests that covered the region until about 1800, through the marked transformations affected by long-cultivated cotton, to contemporary soils of rapidly growing and intensively managed pine forests. These well-documented records significantly enrich the science of ecology and pedology, and provide valuable lessons for land management throughout the world. The book calls for the establishment of a global network of soil-ecosystem studies, like the invaluable Calhoun study on which the book is based, to provide further information on sustainable land management, vital as human demands on soil continue to increase.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Soil and Sustainability

Concerns about soil in the modern world

Managing soils for productivity and environmental quality

Biogeochemical sciences in support of soil management

The science of estimating soil change

Soil change over millennia, centuries and decades

The Calhoun forest: a window to understanding soil change

Soil Change Over Time Scales of Millennia: Long-Term Pedogenesis

Soil development from the Devonian to Mendocino and Hawaii

Genesis of advanced weathering-stage soils at the Calhoun ecosystem

The Calhoun soil profile

The forest's biogeochemical attack on soil minerals

Soil Change Over Time Scales of Centuries: Conversion of Primary Forests to Agricultural Fields

Agricultural beginnings: Native American cultivation

Soil biogeochemistry in cotton fields of the Old South

Agricultural legacies in old-field soils

Soil Change Over Time Scales of Decades: Conversion of Agricultural Fields to Secondary Forests

The birth of a new forest

Accumulation and rapid turnover of soil carbon in a re-establishing forest

Satisfying a forest's four-decade nitrogen demand

Soil re-acidification and circulation of nutrient cations

Changes in soil-phosphorus fractions in a re-establishing forest

Soil Change and the Future

The case for long-term soil-ecosystem experiments

Epilogue

Recommended readings

Carbonic acid weathering reactions

Simulation of bomb-produced 14C in the forest floor at the Calhoun Experimental Forest, SC

Sources of variation in the Calhoun Experimental Forest's main analysis of variance (ANOVA)

Total elemental concentrations for soils from the Calhoun Experimental Forest, SC

References

Index

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