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: 9780521771719
• ISBN10: 0521771714
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-18
• 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.

Author Biography

Daniel D. Richter, Jr. is Professor of Soils and Forest Ecology and Director of the Forest Resources Center at Duke University, North Carolina Daniel Markewitz is Assistant Professor at the Warnell School of Forest Resources at the University of Georgia

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
Foreword	xii
William A. Reiners
Pedro A. Sanchez
Part I Soil and sustainability	1	(66)
Concerns about soil in the modern world	3	(14)
Managing soils for productivity and environmental quality	17	(7)
Biogeochemical sciences in support of soil management	24	(7)
The science of estimating soil change	31	(9)
Soil change over millennia, centuries, and decades	40	(11)
The Calhoun forest: a window to understanding soil change	51	(16)
Part II Soil change over time scales of millennia: long-term pedogenesis	67	(38)
Soil development from the Devonian to Mendocino and Hawaii	69	(8)
Genesis of advanced weathering-stage soils at the Calhoun ecosystem	77	(4)
The Calhoun soil profile	81	(9)
The forest's biogeochemical attack on soil minerals	90	(15)
Part III Soil change over time scales of centuries: conversion of primary forests to agricultural fields	105	(44)
Agricultural beginnings: Native American cultivation	107	(9)
Soil biogeochemistry in cotton fields of the Old South	116	(18)
Agricultural legacies in old-field soils	134	(15)
Part IV Soil change over time scales of decades: conversion of agricultural fields to secondary forests	149	(58)
The birth of a new forest	151	(9)
Accumulation and rapid turnover of soil carbon in a re-establishing forest	160	(9)
Satisfying a forest's four-decade nitrogen demand	169	(13)
Soil re-acidification and circulation of nutrient cations	182	(15)
Changes in soil-phosphorus fractions in a re-establishing forest	197	(10)
Part V Soil change and the future	207	(10)
The case for long-term soil-ecosystem experiments	209	(8)
Epilogue	217	(1)
Recommended readings	218	(8)
Appendices
I Carbonic acid weathering reactions	220	(1)
II Simulation of bomb-produced 14C in the forest floor at the Calhoun Experimental Forest, SC	221	(2)
III Sources of variation in the Calhoun Experimental Forest's main analysis of variance (ANOVA)	223	(1)
IV Total elemental concentrations for soils from the Calhoun Experimental Forest, SC	224	(2)
References	226	(20)
Index	246