The Soil and its Chemistry- Critical Futures

Soil Change Matters 2014

McLaughlin, Mike J.^1

CSIRO Land and Water, University of Adelaide, Waite Campus, PMB 2, Glen-Osmond

SA

5064, Australia^1

关键词: Anthropogenic disturbance;    Aquatic system;    Buffer capacity;    Global impacts;    Human population;    Local scale;    Quality of water;    Statistical interpretation;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/25/1/012007/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1755-1315/25/1/012007

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

Unlike changes over time to the earth's atmosphere or oceans, changes to soils occur at a very local scale, with much less interconnectedness between the points of change. A further difference between soils and other media is the much greater buffer capacity of the system to change, which means that changes are more gradual and difficult to measure. Further difficulties of assessing changes in soil "condition" are due to the natural heterogeneity of soils across landscapes, which poses sampling, analysis and statistical interpretation challenges of a much greater magnitude than those for the atmosphere or for surface or ground waters. Superimpose localised anthropogenic disturbances and enhancements to soil on this (at a farm or paddock level) and it is evident that knowledge and assessment of soil "condition" is needed at a relatively small scale compared to assessments of atmospheric or aquatic system "condition". At the same time, soils contribute significantly at larger scales in modifying (in both good and bad ways) to the quality of water systems, to emissions of gases (greenhouse and others) to the atmosphere, and to feeding a steadily growing human population around the globe - so changes to soil really do matter. This juxtaposition of scale issues means that to understand the global impact of changes to soil "condition", we need to measure changes at small scales and integrate the mosaic of effects up to larger scales i.e. think globally, measure locally.