SSS
Soil System Sciences

Under research

Soil colors – what more could you want?

Nuno Simões University of Algarve, Portugal E-mail: nuno_simoes58@hotmail.com We can easily see that soil color varies from one site to another, with depth, with topographic position and composition. Even color may be light brown in one side of the road and dark brown in the other. Whether for scientific purposes, or just curious, you study the colorimetric interesting variations. Why does soil co ...[Read More]

Will drinking tea get us thinking about soils? Yes, but only if you help us spread the word!

Taru Lehtinen PhD candidate at the Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Iceland tmk2@hi.is The Tea Bag Index Project wants to create a global map on decomposition with the help of citizen scientists. We use teabags to collect vital information on the global carbon cycle. With our protocol (see our web page and our article: Keuskamp et al., 2013), citizen scientists worldwide c ...[Read More]

The Fire Research Institute, more than three decades of Fire Science

Jason Greenlee jasongreenlee@hotmail.com The Fire Research Institute (FRI) was founded in 1983 as a non-profit organization with the lofty goal of promoting world peace through fire science. The concept was stolen from Richard Nixon, who, you will remember, opened up relations between the US and China by sending a ping-pong team to visit China. I thought that more scientific interaction between na ...[Read More]

Monday paper: Managing soil nitrate with cover crops and buffer strips in Sicilian vineyards

A. Novara, L. Gristina, F. Guaitoli, A. Santoro, A. Cerdà. 2013. Managing soil nitrate with cover crops and buffer strips in Sicilian vineyards. Solid Earth, 4, 255-262, doi:10.5194/se-4-255-2013 Abstract When soil nitrate levels are low, plants suffer nitrogen (N) deficiency but when the levels are excessive, soil nitrates can pollute surface and subsurface waters. Strategies to reduce the nitrat ...[Read More]