Search results for "anthropogenic soil"

Anthropogenic Soils and Soil Security: environmetal and economic consideration.

2017

Since ancient times Man and Soil have experienced interwoven links. Nowadays soil scientists continue to stress such links highlighting the importance of soil to provide man’s growing demand for food, water and energy, and also the soil’s importance in providing ecosystem services that affect climate change, human health and biodiversity. In soil management for agricultural purposes, pedotechniques to tailor soils suitable for table grapes cultivation in large-scale farming are used to get substantial financial returns. However farmers, in tailoring soils for high income crops, frequently do not take into account the fundamental objective of the pedotechnique, i. e. to meet the needs of man…

Dynamics of organic carbon pools and microbial diversity over time in anthropogenic terraced soils of Southern Peru

2014

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…

Soil profile dismantlement by land levelling and deep tillage damages soil functioning but not quality

2016

We investigated the effects of land levelling followed by deep tillage, thus inducing a drastic dismantlement of soil profile, on both soil functioning and quality by monitoring various bioindicators (microbial biomass and community structure, basal respiration, enzyme activities) expressed on either whole soil and TOC mass units, respectively. As expected, in disturbed soils all measured properties had much higher coefficients of variation (CVs), regardless of either whole soil or TOC mass basis, due to the induced spatial variability. The amount of total organic C in the first cubic meter of soil profile was of one order of magnitude greater in undisturbed soils compared to disturbed ones…

Diversity and complexity of microbial communities from a chlor-alkali tailings dump

2015

Abstract Revegetation of the tailings dumps produced by various industrial activities is necessary to prevent dust storms and erosion and represents a great challenge for ecological restoration. Little is known about the microbial colonisation and community structure of revegetated tailings following site exploitation. Here, we report the sequencing of 16S rRNA and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) fungal RNA gene amplicons from chlor-alkali residue and from an adjacent undisturbed soil to define the composition and assembly of the rhizosphere microbial communities. After quality filtering, a total of 72,373 and 89,929 bacterial sequences and 122,618 and 111,209 fungal sequences remained fo…

You are earth, you feed on earth and you’ll return to earth

2007

Spatio-Temporal Effects of Land Use Change on the Anthropogenic Soils Diffusion: A Case Study in a Mediterranean Vineyard Area

2008

Anthropogenic soils created ex novo by land-use change in large scale farming are, from a pedogenetic point of view, catastrophic events that bring the soils to time zero and change the natural pattern of the soilscape, remarkably, in some cases. The quantitative aspects of pedodiversity of a soilscape in South-East Sicily, where some types of soils, in recent decades, have suffered a consistent reduction due to the transformations by large scale farming, are considered. The evolution of pedodiversity over a 53-year period (1955 to 2008) is examined using a dedicated statistical method and a space–time model based on Markov analysis and cellular automata in order to predict the evolution of…

Soil interpretation in the context of anthropedogenic transformations and pedotechniques application

2018

Abstract Following a long and vigorous study carried out by the International Committee on Anthropogenic Soils (ICOMANTH), the Soil Taxonomy (ST) classification system recently incorporated a number of changes to include Human-Altered and Human-Transported soils, generally called anthropogenic soils. These changes underwent careful scrutiny as they affect the current classification of existing soil series, and as the proposals and logics are as yet untested against existing data and descriptions. Particular attention was given to the diagnostic characteristics of the anthropogenic soils and to the Subgroups for Human-Altered and Human-Transported soils. In this study, we consider a frequent…

Economic aspects of pedotechnique applications in large scale farming: a case study

2016

Conference of the World Association of Soil and Water Conservation

The “genetic erosion” of the soil ecosystem

2013

Abstract This paper takes into consideration the influence of human activities on the loss of pedodiversity in a Mediterranean area due to large scale farming. In particular it examines the quantitative and qualitative soil changes in a period of 53 years (from 1955 to 2008) evaluating the loss of soil diversity at soil subgroups level of the USDA Soil Taxonomy system. The following indices were used: richness; Shannon’s diversity index; Simpson diversity index; Shannon’s evenness index; Simpson’s evenness index. In this case study, considering what we observed in time, the human intervention in soil transformation could increase the diversity in the landscape in an initial phase, but forwa…