Indigenous land conservation practices such as seasonal grazing and shifting cultivation recognised this vulnerability by allowing the vegetation and soil to recover. However, these were gradually eroded by colonial and postcolonial governance, which prioritised formal land tenure and permanent settlement but paid little attention to soil productivity and protection from erosion.

Ultimately, erosion control cannot be treated as a solely environmental problem.

Happy for you...

I recently took a job where I take soil flux samples on a regular basis. We're monitoring CO2 for the most part with a licor 850, but sometimes CH4 too with a licor 7810 iirc.

I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm going through the motions but I don't fully trust the data that's coming out. It looks right, but we have a custom built setup and can't use soil collars or the fancy fully automated licor domes. I tried performing a DIY leak test today and left more confused than when I started. Can anyone point me to some resources on proper sampling technique and equipment maintainance, or perhaps a proper way to perform a leak test, if any?

Thanks

This profile has ice wedges that melted you can see them in this second picture. Textures are sandy loam over loamy sand, but the wedges are filled in with silt or finer

I thought this community might enjoy seeing the layers i found while digging a pond in my yard. Depth is about 2 feet.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/50221045

Soup

In the Canadian system, this would be a Eluviated District Brunisol. Note the two E horizons - this is referred to as a bisequa soil, where the original profile is buried and then pedogenesis begins again and forms a mini profile over the buried one.

Canadian description would be:

Om Ae Bm IIAeb IIBm II C

Coarse fragments

Cool Btkn horizon - columnar structure

Heating alone won’t drive soil microbes to release more carbon dioxide — they need added carbon and nutrients to thrive. This finding challenges assumptions about how climate warming influences soil emissions.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/27610583

• Tropical forests exchange more CO2 with the atmosphere than any other terrestrial biome, meaning that even a relatively small shift in the balance of carbon uptake and release there could have a big impact on global climate. Despite this, research on tropical soil responses to warming has lagged behind.
• In a field experiment in Puerto Rico, researchers used infrared heaters to warm understory plants and topsoil by 4° Celsius. Warming significantly increased soil carbon emissions, but terrain also had a major impact: A warmed plot at the top of a slope showed an unprecedented 204% increase in CO2 emissions after one year.
• Carbon emissions from plots lower on the slope increased between 42% and 59% in response to warming — in line with the results from the only other long-term tropical soil warming experiment to date. However, the upper-slope response represents the largest change in any soil warming experiment conducted globally.
• The new study results add to a growing body of evidence that tropical soils are far more sensitive to warming than previously thought. If elevated tropical soil CO2 releases persist in the long term, it could have dire consequences for Earth’s climate. But the soil biome may adjust over time, so future effects remain unclear.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• Mongabay article
• research cited

• Earth’s top 2 meters (6 feet) of soil hold 2.5 trillion metric tons of carbon — more than is held in living vegetation and the atmosphere combined. But soil carbon sinks are under threat — global warming could trigger a positive feedback loop that seriously accelerates soil emissions, just as we take steps to decarbonize society.
• The effects of elevated temperature and atmospheric CO₂ on soil carbon have been factored into climate models. But those models don’t currently capture the true complexity of the soil carbon sink, in part because scientists don’t fully understand the mechanisms that influence soil carbon gains and losses.
• Major knowledge gaps urgently need to be addressed: How are long-term soil carbon stores protected from microbial consumption (and CO₂ release)? And how will global warming alter microbial communities, deep soil carbon, and the climate sensitivity of tropical soils (which store a third of global soil carbon)?
• Improved understanding of soil carbon dynamics could offer an opportunity to better manage agricultural and forest soils for carbon sequestration. With proper management, degraded soils could sequester a billion tons of additional carbon annually, making them a key ally in the fight against climate change.

archived (Wayback Machine)

I'm not up to snuff on my USDA taxonomy, but here is an explanation of this horizon:

• Soils consist of three master horizons: A, B and C
• this soil is from the B horizon
• two nearly mutually exclusive pedogenic processes have occured to create this horizon:

1. Illuviation - the deposition of clays from the A horizon
2. Carbonate enrichment

Clays and carbonates both leach from the A horizon during pedogenesis, but carbonates move way faster and are long gone before the first clay particles arrive. Clays move much slower and don't go as far.

You can get carbonate enrichment from deeper in the profile though capillary rise, but it's almost always restricted to the C horizon. What you end up with is a very rich carbonate layer over top of the naturally calcareous layer of the soil.

In THIS case, evaporation is so strong it's brought these carbonates into the B (middle) horizon so you end up with a calcareous, clay enriched B horizon which really should not exist.

Soils are wild.

Bonus picture