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Soil quality reflects how well a soil performs the functions of maintaining biodiversity and productivity, partitioning water and solute flow, filtering and buffering, nutrient cycling, and providing support for plants and other structures. Soil management has a major impact on soil quality. Soil quality relates to soil functions. Unlike water ...
There are various factors that affect soil temperature, such as water content, [84] soil color, [85] and relief (slope, orientation, and elevation), [86] and soil cover (shading and insulation), in addition to air temperature. [87] The color of the ground cover and its insulating properties have a strong influence on soil temperature. [88]
Soil fertility refers to the ability of soil to sustain agricultural plant growth, i.e. to provide plant habitat and result in sustained and consistent yields of high quality. [3] It also refers to the soil's ability to supply plant/crop nutrients in the right quantities and qualities over a sustained period of time.
Soil is a product of several factors: the influence of climate, relief (elevation, orientation, and slope of terrain), organisms, and the soil's parent materials (original minerals) interacting over time. [4]
Soil microbial communities experience shifts in the diversity and composition during dehydration and rehydration cycles. [5] Soil moisture affects carbon cycling a phenomenon known as Birch effect. [6] [7] Temperature variations in soil are influenced by factors such as seasonality, environmental conditions, vegetation, and soil composition.
The latter becomes soil under the influence of a series of soil-formation factors (climate, vegetation, country, relief and age). According to him, soil should be called the "daily" or outward horizons of rocks regardless of the type; they are changed naturally by the common effect of water, air and various kinds of living and dead organisms. [8]
SOM is especially critical for soil functions and quality. [ 2 ] The benefits of SOM result from several complex, interactive, edaphic factors; a non-exhaustive list of these benefits to soil function includes improvement of soil structure , aggregation , water retention , soil biodiversity , absorption and retention of pollutants , buffering ...
The approach of other soil labs also entering the soil health field is to add into common chemical nutrient testing a biological set of factors not normally included in routine soil testing. The best example is adding biological soil respiration ("CO 2 -Burst") as a test procedure; this has already been adapted to modern commercial labs in the ...