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Soil also has more general culture functions as they act as a part of the cultural landscape of our minds as well as the physical world around us. [6] An attachment to home soils or a sense of place is a cultural attribute developed mores strongly in certain people.
The first PTF came from the study of Lyman Briggs and McLane (1907). They determined the wilting coefficient, which is defined as percentage water content of a soil when the plants growing in that soil are first reduced to a wilted condition from which they cannot recover in an approximately saturated atmosphere without the addition of water to the soil, as a function of particle-size:
Soil production function. Soil production function refers to the rate of bedrock weathering into soil as a function of soil thickness. A general model suggests that the rate of physical weathering of bedrock (de/dt) can be represented as an exponential decline with soil thickness: / = []
Soil has four important functions: as a medium for plant growth; as a means of water storage, supply, and purification; as a modifier of Earth's atmosphere; as a habitat for organisms; All of these functions, in their turn, modify the soil and its properties. Soil science has two basic branches of study: edaphology and pedology.
Soil bulk density, when determined at standardized moisture conditions, is an estimate of soil compaction. [3] Soil porosity consists of the void part of the soil volume and is occupied by gases or water. Soil consistency is the ability of soil materials to stick together. Soil temperature and colour are self-defining.
Soil health is a state of a soil meeting its range of ecosystem functions as appropriate to its environment. In more colloquial terms, the health of soil arises from favorable interactions of all soil components (living and non-living) that belong together, as in microbiota , plants and animals.
Soil has a crucial function in the global carbon cycle, with the global soil carbon pool estimated to be 2,500 gigatons. This is 3.3 times the amount of the atmospheric pool at 750 gigatons and 4.5 times the biotic pool at 560 gigatons.
The history of edaphology is not simple, as the two main alternative terms for soil science—pedology and edaphology—were initially poorly distinguished. [10] Friedrich Albert Fallou originally conceived pedology in the 19th century as a fundamental science separate from the applied science of agrology, [11] a predecessor term for edaphology, [12] a distinction retained in the current ...