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Soil, also commonly referred to as earth, is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms that together support the life of plants and soil organisms. Some scientific definitions distinguish dirt from soil by restricting the former term specifically to displaced soil. Soil measuring and surveying device
A fen is located on a slope, flat, or in a depression and gets most of its water from the surrounding mineral soil or from groundwater (minerotrophic). Thus, while a bog is always acidic and nutrient-poor, a fen may be slightly acidic, neutral, or alkaline, and either nutrient-poor or nutrient-rich. [ 8 ]
Soil texture is determined by the relative proportion of the three kinds of soil mineral particles, called soil separates: sand, silt, and clay. At the next larger scale, soil structures called peds or more commonly soil aggregates are created from the soil separates when iron oxides , carbonates , clay, silica and humus , coat particles and ...
About 1,000 soil subgroups are defined in the United States. [6] A soil family category is a group of soils within a subgroup and describes the physical and chemical properties which affect the response of soil to agricultural management and engineering applications. The principal characteristics used to differentiate soil families include ...
The mineral material from which a soil forms is called parent material. Rock, whether its origin is igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic, is the source of all soil mineral materials and the origin of all plant nutrients with the exceptions of nitrogen, hydrogen and carbon.
This page was last edited on 20 June 2007, at 06:59 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may ...
Podzolization (or Podsolization [9]) is a complex soil formation process by which dissolved organic matter and ions of iron and aluminium, released through weathering of various minerals, form organo-mineral complexes and are moved from the upper parts of the soil profile and deposit in the deeper parts of soil.
The soil mineral apatite is the most common mineral source of phosphorus, from which it can be extracted by microbial and root exudates, [79] [80] with an important contribution of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. [81] The most common form of organic phosphate is phytate, the principal storage form of phosphorus in many plant tissues.