Search results for " Pedodiversity"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Soil geography and diversity of the European biogeographical regions
2013
For decades, soil geography has beenmainly a qualitative and descriptive discipline. There are nowtechnologies and mathematical tools available that allow formalizing soil geography in more quantitative terms. In this paper, the distribution and diversity of the soils of Europe are analyzed using GIS tools and pedodiversity algorithms. Soil data were taken from the European Soil Database (V2.0) and computed within the spatial framework of the Biogeographical Regions of Europe (BGRE) as defined by the European Environmental Agency (EEA) on the basis of climate and vegetation. The results obtained show the soil assemblages, including dominant soils and endemic and non-endemic soil minorities,…
The crucial interactions between climate and soil
2022
Since the birth of soil science, climate has been recognized as a soil-forming factor, along with parent rock, time, topography, and organisms (from which humans were later kept distinct), often prevalent on the other factors on the very long term. But the climate is in turns affected by soils and their management. This paper describes the interrelationships between climate – and its current change – and soil, focusing on each single factor of its formation. Parent material governs, primarily through the particle size distribution, the capacity of soil to retain water and organic matter, which are two main soil-related drivers of the climate. Time is the only unmanageable soil-forming facto…
The “Soil Genetic Erosion”: a new threat for soils?
2015
During the 1990’s the concept of pedodiversity started to be diffused in the scientific literature and the decrement of the soil diversity in space and time - particularly due to human activity - has been seen as a sort of underhand problem affecting soil ecosystems, considering that different soil types face gradual or drastic reduction or complete loss of their unique “genetic features”. Pedodiversity has received considerable recent interest, especially as peculiar aspect of biodiversity and has been assessed by several authors by applying diversity indices used in ecology. This paper takes into consideration the influence of human activities on the loss of pedodiversity in a Mediterrane…
Repercussion of anthropogenic landscape changes on pedodiversity and preservation of the pedological heritage
2013
Over a period of time people have lived in and with their surrounding landscapes and for several thousand years transformed the soilscapes and the vegetation into cultural landscape types important for their economy and to meet their needs (Richter 2007, Ellis 2011, Hjelle 2012). The sustainable provision of goods and services depends critically on managing soils without damaging the natural soilscapes and the related natural resources. To support the transition towards sustainable development, science needs to understand how land-use change affects the environment and how this, in turn, feeds back into human livelihood strategies or infl uences the vulnerability of the environment (Rounsev…
Soil Cadastre in Italy for Sustainable Development: the Urban Soil Cadastre (the Second Branch)
2020
The description of the second branch of the Land Cadastre concludes with the description of the structure of the new inventory Land Cadastre. The principles applied are always the same: computer node where all the information present in the various municipal, regional, state, reclamation consortia and research centres can be entered. The scheme used in each branch of the structure is that of the current Cadastre. In this work the guide is the Urban or Buildings with the two elements the Particle Map Sheet and the Cadastral Certificate. The cultural intensification is the first step and concerns both the cartographic part and the areas of the condominiums outside the buildings, and the parti…