Understanding Soil Change : Soil Sustainability over Millennia, Centuries, and Decades

Using data from the long-term Calhoun Forest Experiment, this book explores a legacy of soil change in a region of ecological, agricultural and forestry significance. The resulting synthesis provides lessons for land management throughout the world and illustrates the need for a global network of similar soil-ecosystem study sites.

Across the world, soils are managed with an intensity and at a geographic scale never before attempted, yet we know remarkably little about how and why managed soils change through time. Understanding Soil Change explores a legacy of soil change in south-eastern North America, a region of global ecologic, agricultural and forestry significance: from the acidic soils of primary hardwood forests that covered the region until about 1800, through the marked transformations affected by long-cultivated cotton, to contemporary soils of rapidly growing and intensively managed pine forests. These well-documented records significantly enrich the science of ecology and pedology, and provide valuable lessons for land management throughout the world. The book calls for the establishment of a global network of soil-ecosystem studies, like the invaluable Calhoun study on which the book is based, to provide further information on sustainable land management, vital as human demands on soil continue to increase.