myResearchSpace

The journal Urban Ecosystems has just published a Special Issue on Soils. As our planet and its human populations become increasingly urbanised, this would seem to be a growth area for the earth and ecological sciences. Some of the articles from this issue of the journal: A comparison of soil organic carbon stocks between residential turf ...

The journal Nature is marking The Year of Planet Earth in 2008 with free access to their Year of Planet Earth feature - find it at http://www.nature.com/nature/supplements/collections/yearofplanetearth/. Many of the articles in the feature have relevance to soil science: From landscapes into geological history - Philip A. Allen Nature 451, ...

I apologize for lazy blogging, with a promise to not just do listings of news articles about soils. If something REALLY interesting comes up I'll let people know, but really that's not what this blog is all about. Unfortunately that means that I have to get motivated about writing up articles I've read recently. At least I have done the reading ...

Week ending 5 October 2007... 1.  Arctic heat wave worries scientistsMelting permafrost creates threateningly unstable soils... - 4 Oct 2007 2.  Biodiesel facility plans interest canegrowers A change of land use for sugar cane growers may, incidentally, improve soil fertility... - 3 Oct 2007 3.  Authorities predict severe ...

from abc.net.au ...ignoring the usual stuff about ''home soil'', ''US soil'', ''Iraqi soil'', etc. ... Green group opposes northern irrigated crops plan The Mayor of Richmond Shire (North Queensland) is ... a bit sick of this salinity issue ... soil tests around Richmond ...[show]... perfectly good soils... ...

from abc.net.au ...ignoring the usual stuff about ''home soil'', ''US soil'', ''Iraqi soil'', etc. ... New soil samples prove the Arctic is ours: Russia - 20 Sep 2007 Soil analysis used for political gain - geochemical similarities between Russian soils and the ocean floor under the North Pole   ...

A website just begging to be blogged on this site - a gallery in Seattle, USA called SOIL (the link is to their March 2007 exhibition, ''More Dirt''. See also August 2006, How Does Grass Grow, and probably others). I haven't worked out why it's called SOIL. But not to blog this would be negligent. 

Some artists use the colours and textures in soil to create startlingly beautiful artwork. There are a few examples of this around (in no particular order)...Taufik Hidayat in IndonesiaJan Lang from Nebraska USATeresa Murak, PolandYüksel Arslan, Turkey...and see this compilation by, of all people, NASA [added 2007.09.19]The image at right does not ...

The United States Department of Agriculture provides numerous world maps showing the global distribution of key soil properties - worth checking out at http://soils.usda.gov/use/worldsoils/mapindex/. At right is the thumbnail of their World Soil Orders map.

this guy blogged us . . . so I'm blogging his blog. A true 21st-century return compliment. So, head for transect points written by Philip Small. Prolific (at least a post a week for 2007, I reckon) and eclectic (soils news from all around the place). Check it out.