Soils can be thought of as storehouses for plant nutrients. Many nutrients, such as calcium and magnesium, may be supplied to plants solely from reserves held in the soil. Others like potassium are ...

Soil carbon storage is a vital ecosystem service, resulting from interactions of ecological processes. Human activities affecting these processes can lead to carbon loss or improved storage. Aa Aa ...

Using soil samples from your own area, your class will get up close and see what they can find inside different soils. A practical observation activity looking at soil in detail, with discussion ...

Soil fertility is the ability of soil to sustain plant growth and optimize crop yield. This can be enhanced through organic and inorganic fertilizers to the soil. Nuclear techniques provide data that ...

A worm burrows its way through the dark earth, ingesting particles of soil and expelling nutrient-rich casts in a constant forage for food. Charles Darwin described earthworms as one of the most ...

The 2021 peer-reviewed study Pesticides and Soil Invertebrates: A Hazard Assessment shows that pesticides widely used in American agriculture pose a grave threat to organisms needed for healthy soil, ...

When European-American settlers first began ploughing in Iowa, they found the weather and local geology had combined this organic mulch with sand and silt to form a nutrient-rich type of soil ...

Soil is important to each of us in our everyday lives, but too often we think about it as just dirt! Soil is the special link between plants and humans. It feeds us, captures carbon and provides a ...

We have excellent teaching, research, and outreach programs in the areas of plant biology (cellular, genetics, genomics, microbial, molecular and physiology), agronomy (including pathology, soil ...

Tipton now plants them instead of letting his fields lie fallow after the harvest. Tipton lets some soil come apart in his hands. Inside is a pink earthworm. “It's a sign of life,” he says.

Soil is a mixture of tiny particles of rock, dead plants and animals, air and water. Different soils have different properties depending on their composition. Sandy soil is pale coloured and has ...