SOIL AS A MATERIAL AND AS A NATURAL BODY

The Pedosphere and the Critical Zone

Weil, R.R and Brady, N.C. (2017). The Nature and Properties of Soil,
15th ed., Pearson Education Limited, Harlow, England.

TWO DISTINCT CONCEPTS OF SOILS

(read carefully, as this is may be confusing to you. Try to understand the two concepts and how they are different
and related to each other)

1. Soil as a material
2. Soil as natural bodies

Soil as a material
Soil is a material composed of minerals, gases, water, organic substances, and microorganisms. Some
people (usually not soil scientists!) also refer to this material as dirt, especially when it is found where it
is not welcome (e.g., in your clothes or under your fingernails).

Soil as natural bodies

A soil is a three-dimensional natural body in the same sense that a mountain, lake, or valley is. The soil is
a collection of individually different soil bodies, often said to cover the land as the peel covers an
orange. However, while the peel is relatively uniform around the orange, the soil is highly variable from
place to place on Earth. One of the individual bodies, a soil, is to the soil as an individual tree is to the
Earth’s vegetation. Just as one may find sugar maples, oaks, hemlocks, and many other species of trees
in a particular forest, so, too, might one find Los Osos loams, Altamont clays, San Benito clay loams,
Diablo silty clays, and other kinds of soils in a particular landscape.

Soils are natural bodies composed of soil (the material just described) plus roots, animals, rocks,
artifacts, and so forth. By dipping a bucket into a lake you may sample some of its water.
In the same way, by making a hole in a soil, you may retrieve some soil. Thus, you can take a sample of
soil or water into a laboratory and analyze its contents, but you must go out into the field to study a soil
or a lake.
The Critical Zone.

The outer layers of our planet that lie between the tops of the tallest trees and the bottom of
the groundwater aquifers that feed our rivers.
PEDOSPHERE

Environmental research is increasingly focused on this zone where active cycles and flows of
materials and energy support life on Earth. Soil plays a central role in this critical zone.
The importance of the soil derives in large part from its role as an interface between the worlds of
rock (the lithosphere), air (the atmosphere), water (the hydrosphere), and living things (the biosphere).
Environments where all four of these worlds interact are often the most complex and productive on
Earth.
An estuary, where shallow waters meet the land and air, is an example of such an environment. The
soil, or pedosphere, is another example.
The concept of the soil as interface means different things at different scales.

(Diagram courtesy of Ray R. Weil)

The soil as interface can be understood at many different scales (refer to figure above).
(a) At the kilometer scale (a), soils channel water from rain to rivers and transfer mineral elements from
bed rocks to the oceans. Soil participates in global cycles of rock weathering, atmospheric gas changes,
water storage and partitioning, and the life of terrestrial ecosystems. They also substantially influence
the global balance of atmospheric gases.

(b) At a scale of a few meters (b), soil forms a transition zone between the hard rock below and the
atmosphere above—a zone through which surface water and groundwater flow and in which plants and
other living organisms thrive. It transfers mineral elements from the Earth’s rock crust to its vegetation.
It processes or stores the organic remains of terrestrial plants and animals.

(c) A thousand times smaller, at the millimeter scale (c), mineral particles form the skeleton of the soil
that defines pore spaces, some filled with air and some with water, in which tiny creatures lead their
lives. Soil provides diverse microhabitats for air-breathing and aquatic organisms, channels water and
nutrients to plant roots, and provides surfaces and solution vessels for thousands of biochemical
reactions.

(d) Finally, at the micrometer and nanometer scales (d), soil minerals (lithosphere) provide charges,
reactive surfaces that adsorb water and cations dissolved in water (hydrosphere), gases (atmosphere),
and bacteria and complex humus macromolecules (biosphere). Soil provides ordered and complex
surfaces, both mineral and organic, that act as templates for chemical reactions and interact with water
and solutes. Its tiniest mineral particles form micro-zones of electromagnetic charge that attract
everything from bacterial cell walls to proteins to conglomerates of water molecules.
THE CONCEPT OF INDIVIDUAL SOILS

The natural body concept of soils recognizes the existence of individual entities, each of which we call a
soil. Just as human individuals may be grouped according to characteristics such as gender, height,
intelligence, or hair color, soil individuals having one or more characteristics in common may be grouped
together. In turn, we may aggregate these groups into higher-level categories of soils, each having some
characteristic that sets them apart from the others. Increasingly broad soil groups are defined as one
moves up the classification pyramid from a soil to the soil.

There are seldom sharp demarcations between one soil individual and another. The properties gradually
change from one soil individual to an adjacent one. The gradation in soil properties can be compared to
the gradation in the wavelengths of light in a rainbow. The change is gradual, and yet we differentiate
between what we call green and what we call blue.

Soils in the field are heterogeneous; that is, the profile characteristics are not exactly the same at any
two points within the soil individual you may choose to examine. Consequently, it is necessary to
characterize a soil individual in terms of an imaginary three-dimensional unit called a pedon.

PEDON
It is the smallest sampling unit that displays the full range of properties characteristic of a particular soil.
Pedons occupy from about 1 to 10 m2 of land area. Because it is what is actually examined during field
investigation of soils, the pedon serves as the fundamental unit of soil classification.

POLYPEDON
A soil unit in a landscape that consists of a group of very similar pedons, closely associated together in
the field (group of similar pedons) is a polypedon.

When a polypedon is of sufficient size to be recognized as a landscape component is then termed as a

soil individual.

All the soil individuals in the world that have in common a suite of soil profile properties and horizons
that fall within a particular range are said to belong to the same soil series.

A soil series, then, is a class of soils, not a soil individual, in the same way that Pinus sylvestris is a
species of tree, not a particular individual tree.
Tens of thousands of soil series have been characterized and comprise the basic units used to classify
the world’s soils. As we shall see in
A schematic diagram to illustrate the concept of pedon and of the soil profile that characterizes it. Note
that several contiguous pedons with similar characteristics are grouped together in a larger area
(outlined by broken lines) called a polypedon or soil individual. Several soil individuals are present in the
landscape on the left. (Diagram courtesy of Ray R. Weil)

References:

Foth, H.D. (1990). Fundamentals of Soil Science, 8th ed. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Canada.

Weil, R.R and Brady, N.C. (2017). The Nature and Properties of Soil, 15th ed., Pearson Education Limited,
Harlow, England.

White, R.E. (2006). Principles and Practice of Soil Science. The Soil as a Natural Resource, 4th ed.,
Blackwell Science Limited, Australia.