Pedology

Soil is not only a support for vegetation, but it is also the pedosphere, the locus of numerous interactions between climate, soil life and its residues, the mineral material of the original and added rock, and its position in the landscape. During its formation and genesis, the soil profile slowly deepens and develops characteristic layers, called ‘horizons’, while a steady state balance is approached. Soil users showed initially little concern in the dynamics of soil. They saw it as medium whose chemical, physical and biological properties were useful for the services of agronomic productivity. On the other hand, pedologists and geologists did not initially focus on the agronomic applications of the soil characteristics but upon its relation to the nature and history of landscapes. Today, there is an integration of the two disciplinary approaches as part of landscape and environmental sciences. Pedologists are now also interested in the practical applications of a good understanding of pedogenesis processes, like interpreting its environmental history and predicting consequences of changes in land use, while agronomists understand that the cultivated soil is a complex medium, often resulting from several thousands of years of evolution. They understand that the current balance is fragile and that only a thorough knowledge of its history makes it possible to ensure its sustainable use. The Pedology shows by its very title that it takes a global approach to the study of land, the uses of which are manifold: for production of plant and animal biomass, as purifying medium of groundwater as well as atmosphere against ever-increasingly aggressive pollution, as base for food production that enables humanity to be fed, as inexhaustible reservoir of an internal biomass even larger and more varied than that which covers its surface. The book takes into account these multiple functions of the soil and gives to them an overall perspective without, however, neglecting detailed information. Such syntheses, unfortunately too rare, are indispensable in our age of excessive specialization. This book demonstrates that pedology is not reserved only for specialists, but concerns a wide public: for example, college professors and higher-level teachers in all allied disciplines, obviously not forgetting the wide spectrum of users – managers, agronomists, silviculturists.