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?
Experimental burn carried out to study the impacts of fire on soil. Credit: Imaggeo/Antonio Jordán.
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]