Pedodiversity

In Chap. 6, dealing with pedodiversity of Italy, Edoardo A. C. Costantini, Roberto Barbetti, Maria Fantappie` , Giovanni L’Abate, Romina Lorenzetti, and Simona Magini illustrate the distribution of soil classes, mainly by means of maps. Soil regions on hills are the most lithologically and climatically variable environments, and host the greatest soil variability and endemisms. A vast majority of the WRB reference soil groups (25 out of 32), as well as soil orders of Soil Taxonomy (10 out of 12) are represented in the main Italian soil typological units (STUs), but the clear skewness and lognormal distribution of STUs demonstrate the utmost endemic nature of many Italian soils. In particula…

Threshold climatic changes for SOM variations in different Mediterranean crop systems

Le Climosequenze: strumenti per valutare gli effetti dei cambiamenti climatici su alcune proprietà e caratteri funzionali del suolo - un caso studio in Sicilia.

USING WRB TO MAP THE SOIL SYSTEMS OF ITALY

Aim of this work was to test the 2010 version of the WRB soil classification for compilating a map of the soil systems of Italy at 1:500,000 scale. The source of data was the national geodatabase storing information on 1,414 Soil Typological Units (STUs). Though, basically, we followed WRB criteria to prioritize soil qualifiers, however, it was necessary to work out an original methodology in the map legend representation to reproduce the high variability inside each delineation meanwhile avoiding any loss of information. Each map unit may represent a combination of three codominant STUs at the most. Dominant STUs were assessed summing up the occurrence of STUs in the Land Components (LCs) …

Comparing Different approaches - Data mining, Geostatistic, and Deterministic pedology - to assess the Frequency of WRB reference soil groups in the Italian Soil Regions

Estimating frequency of soil classes in map unit is always affected by some degree of uncertainty, especially at small scales, with a larger generalization. The aim of this study was to compare different possible approaches - data mining, geostatistic, deterministic pedology - to assess the frequency of WRB Reference Soil Groups (RSG) in the major Italian soil regions. In the soil map of Italy (Costantini et al., 2012), a list of the first five RSG was reported in each major 10 soil regions. The soil map was produced using the national soil geodatabase, which stored 22,015 analyzed and classified pedons, 1,413 soil typological unit (STU) and a set of auxiliary variables (lithology, land-use…

SOILS WITH HIGH ORGANIC CARBON STORAGE CAPACITY IN DEPTH

Most studies about soil organic carbon (OC) stock focus on the topsoil storage capacity, however, it has been proved that OC can reach relatively high values also in depth. The aim of this work was a preliminary investigation of the soil types with a high OC content in depth and the relationship with the main pedogenetic factors. The dataset was the 1,414 Italian National Soil Typologies (STU). The selected attributes were: mean value of OC in the superficial functional horizon (L1); weighted average value between 50 and 100 cm (L2) and under 100 cm (L3); WRB classification; main lithology, morphology and land-use. About 92% of typologies had more than 0.58% of OC in L1, about 30% in L2, an…