Sarah Connors, EGU Science Policy Fellow Antonio Jordán, University of Seville Soil is often considered as the skin of the Earth and is located at the interface between the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere. Soil is the physical and nutritional support for living organisms in emerged areas.
Ingrid Kögel-Knabner, a multidisciplinary soil scientist
Ingrid Kögel-Knabner Chair of Soil Science Technical University of Munich The 2015 Philippe Duchaufour Medal is awarded to Ingrid Kögel-Knabner for her fundamental and ground-breaking work on the dynamics and stabilisation of soil organic matter in soils from a basic-chemistry and organo-mineral interactions perspective. I received my doctorate from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, in 1987. In ...[Read More]
Soil facts
As part of the activities of the International Year of Soils, FAO has published the following Soil Facts. Contribute with your comments!
Eric Brevik’s work awarded by Geoderma
The review paper The use of electromagnetic induction techniques in soils studies, by James A. Doolittle and Eric Brevik, has been awarded as the Geoderma’s Best Review of 2014. The Geoderma Best Paper Awards are chosen every year since 2013. Candidates are nominated by the Geoderma Editorial Board and a short-list is then created for voting by the editorial Board. The winner of the Geoderma ...[Read More]
Turning unproductive soil into profits
Preeti Roychand La Trobe University AgriBio Centre for AgriBioscience Melbourne, VIC, Australia Sandy soils in Western Australia are bad soils for growing plants due to their poor nutrients and water holding capacity (see an example in Figure 1). In general, these soils are water repellent, which leads to land degradation by increasing soil erosion risk and run-off rates. Nevertheless, these soils ...[Read More]
Fire and soil microorganisms: where should we focus on?
Gema Bárcenas-Moreno University of Seville, Sevilla, Spain Currently, the complexity of soil microbial ecology on soil systems is a hot topic in the environmental sciences, since the scientific community has achieved a deep knowledge of the relevance of microorganisms in soil processes. After several decades of study of the effects of wildfires on soils, one of the main conclusions is that soil mi ...[Read More]
Soil science, food production and hunger in Africa
A child dies from malnutrition or related causes every five seconds. Every child who dies from hunger is assassinated. And we have a herd of market traders, speculators and financial bandits who have turned wild and constructed a world of inequality and horror. We have to put a stop to this. Jean Ziegler Soil as a resource A long history of land use Ever since man learned to cultivate, soil has be ...[Read More]
Soils at Imaggeo: Badlands in central Spain
Saskia Keesstra, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands Description This composite shows a constellation of combined visual and infrared imaging of a smouldering combustion front spreading radially over a thin sample of dry peat. The central watch is created by a series of twelve wedges. Each wedge is extracted from a photo taken every 5 min from an elevated view looking down into the ...[Read More]
Wildfires and soil: Where are we now?
Lorena M. Zavala. University of Seville, Sevilla, Spain Antonio Jordán. University of Seville, Sevilla, Spain Jorge Mataix-Solera. University Miguel Hernández, Elche, Spain Artemi Cerdà. University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain Are wildfires a natural ecological factor or an environmental problem? According to official statistics, during the 1990’s, about 1.5 millions ha were burned in Spain. ...[Read More]
Monday paper: Simulating microbial degradation of organic matter in a simple porous system using the 3-D diffusion-based model MOSAIC
Monga, O., Garnier, P., Pot, V., Coucheney, E., Nunan, N., Otten, W., and Chenu, C.: Simulating microbial degradation of organic matter in a simple porous system using the 3-D diffusion-based model MOSAIC, Biogeosciences, 11, 2201-2209, doi:10.5194/bg-11-2201-2014, 2014. Abstract This paper deals with the simulation of microbial degradation of organic matter in soil within the pore space at a micr ...[Read More]