Soils form a unique and irreplaceable essential resource for all terrestrial organisms, including man. Soils form not only the very thin outer skin of the earth's crust that is exploited by plant roots for anchorage and supply of water and nutrients. Soils are complex natural bodies formed under the influence of plants, microorganisms and soil animals, water and air from their parent material, i.e. solid rock or unconsolidated sediments. Physically, chemically and mineralogically they usually differ strongly from the parent material, and normally are far more suitable as a rooting medium for plants. In addition to serving as a substrate for plant growth, including crops and pasture, soils play a dominant role in the biogeochemical cycling of water, carbon, nitrogen and other elements, influencing the chemical composition and turnover rates of substances in the atmosphere and the hydrosphere. Soils take decades to millennia to form. We tread on them and do not usually see their interior, so we tend to take them for granted. But improper and abusive agricultural management, careless land- clearing and reclamation, man-induced erosion, salinisation and acidification, desertification, air- and water pollution, and withdrawal of land for housing, industry and transportation now destroy soils more rapidly than they can be formed.
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The authors set out to write a textbook on the processes of soil profile genesis and should be applauded for accomplishing this objective.
The many questions and problems in each chapter - together with extensive answers and solutions - are the clear strength of Soil Formation. Questions delve into the fundamental tenets of pedology, challenge the reader to connect basic processes to contemporary features, and lead students through the relative merits of conflicting theories on the formation of specific soil features.
As a professor trained in soil genesis, I found the questions almost uniformly interesting, challenging, and penetrating. Working through the questions and problems in this book would provide a rigorous training for any advanced pedology graduate student (and for many pedology professors as well). The broader organization of the book makes it relatively easy to find the appropriate chapter for a topic of interest. No other pedology text provides a collection of questions and problems remotely comparable to those included in Soil Formation.
(David J. Brown, Montana State University, Soil Science Vol. 169 No. 4)
The many questions and problems in each chapter - together with extensive answers and solutions - are the clear strength of Soil Formation. Questions delve into the fundamental tenets of pedology, challenge the reader to connect basic processes to contemporary features, and lead students through the relative merits of conflicting theories on the formation of specific soil features.
As a professor trained in soil genesis, I found the questions almost uniformly interesting, challenging, and penetrating. Working through the questions and problems in this book would provide a rigorous training for any advanced pedology graduate student (and for many pedology professors as well). The broader organization of the book makes it relatively easy to find the appropriate chapter for a topic of interest. No other pedology text provides a collection of questions and problems remotely comparable to those included in Soil Formation.
(David J. Brown, Montana State University, Soil Science Vol. 169 No. 4)