Understanding Soil Change

Preface; Acknowledgements; Foreword William A. Reiners and Pedro A. Sánchez; Part I. Soil and Sustainability: 1. Concerns about soil in the modern world; 2. Managing soils for productivity and environmental quality; 3. Biogeochemical sciences in support of soil management; 4. The science of estimating soil change; 5. Soil change over millennia, centuries and decades; 6. The Calhoun forest: a window to understanding soil change; Part II. Soil Change over Time Scales of Millennia: Long-Term Pedogenesis; 7. Soil development from the Devonian to Mendocino and Hawaii; 8. Genesis of advanced weathering-stage soils at the Calhoun ecosystem; 9. The Calhoun soil profile; 10. The forest's biogeochemical attack on soil minerals; Part III. Soil Change over Time Scales of Centuries: Conversion of Primary Forests to Agricultural Fields: 11. Agricultural beginnings: Native American cultivation; 12. Soil biogeochemistry in cotton fields of the Old South; 13. Agricultural legacies in old-field soils; Part IV. Soil Change over Time Scales of Decades: Conversion of Agricultural Fields to Secondary Forests: 14. The birth of a new forest; 15. Accumulation and rapid turnover of soil carbon in a re-establishing forest; 16. Satisfying a forest's four-decade nitrogen demand; 17. Soil re-acidification and circulation of nutrient cations; 18. Changes in soil-phosphorus fractions in a re-establishing forest; Part V. Soil Change and the Future: 19. The case for long-term soil-ecosystem experiments; Epilogue; Recommended readings; Appendix I. Carbonic acid weathering reactions; Appendix II. Simulation of bomb-produced 14C in the forest floor at the Calhoun Experimental Forest, SC; Appendix III. Sources of variation in the Calhoun Experimental Forest's main analysis of variance (ANOVA); Appendix IV. Total elemental concentrations for soils from the Calhoun Experimental Forest, SC; References; Index.