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

An important synthesis of a long-term study in the USA which provides lessons for land management throughout the world.

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

9780521771719, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 June 2001

272 pages, 73 b/w illus. 33 tables
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.6 cm, 0.573 kg

'… a worthy addition to any private or library collection.' Restoration Ecology

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.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Foreword William A. Reiners and Pedro A. Sánchez
Part I. Soil and Sustainability: 1. Concerns about soil in the modern world
2. Managing soils for productivity and environmental quality
3. Biogeochemical sciences in support of soil management
4. The science of estimating soil change
5. Soil change over millennia, centuries and decades
6. The Calhoun forest: a window to understanding soil change
Part II. Soil Change over Time Scales of Millennia: Long-Term Pedogenesis
7. Soil development from the Devonian to Mendocino and Hawaii
8. Genesis of advanced weathering-stage soils at the Calhoun ecosystem
9. The Calhoun soil profile
10. The forest's biogeochemical attack on soil minerals
Part III. Soil Change over Time Scales of Centuries: Conversion of Primary Forests to Agricultural Fields: 11. Agricultural beginnings: Native American cultivation
12. Soil biogeochemistry in cotton fields of the Old South
13. Agricultural legacies in old-field soils
Part IV. Soil Change over Time Scales of Decades: Conversion of Agricultural Fields to Secondary Forests: 14. The birth of a new forest
15. Accumulation and rapid turnover of soil carbon in a re-establishing forest
16. Satisfying a forest's four-decade nitrogen demand
17. Soil re-acidification and circulation of nutrient cations
18. Changes in soil-phosphorus fractions in a re-establishing forest
Part V. Soil Change and the Future: 19. The case for long-term soil-ecosystem experiments
Epilogue
Recommended readings
Appendix I. Carbonic acid weathering reactions
Appendix II. Simulation of bomb-produced 14C in the forest floor at the Calhoun Experimental Forest, SC
Appendix III. Sources of variation in the Calhoun Experimental Forest's main analysis of variance (ANOVA)
Appendix IV. Total elemental concentrations for soils from the Calhoun Experimental Forest, SC
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Environmental science, engineering & technology [TQ], Soil science, sedimentology [RBGB], Ecological science, the Biosphere [PSAF]