Recent  

We use a holistic framework to analyze how agricultural policy in Germany affects the sustainability of soil management. We look at the adequacy of policy targets, objects (i.e. drivers of soil degradation), instruments and assumptions about farmers' behaviour, and the coherence among these four dimensions. We find deficits in each dimension, particularly object and instrument adequacy. Agricultural soil policy in Germany lacks depth and coherence, and the role of biomass demand is neglected.

Mineralogical combinations of aluminous clay and pedogenic Fe oxides revealed significant effects on soil structure and related OC storage. The mineralogical combination resulting in the largest aggregate stability do not better preserved OC during conversion of forests into croplands. Structural changes in the direction of smaller mean weight diameters do not cancel out the stabilizing effect of soil minerals.

We developed the Swiss mid-infrared spectral library and a statistical model collection across 4374 soil samples with reference measurements of 17 properties. Our library incorporates soil from 1094 grid locations and 71 long-term monitoring sites. This work confirms once again that nationwide spectral libraries with diverse soils can reliably feed information to fast chemical diagnosis. Our way of data-driven reduction of the library has accuracy potential for monitoring carbon at plot scale.

Freezing and thawing cycles are an important agent of soil structural transformation during the winter season in the mid-latitudes. This study shoows that it promotes a well-connected pore system, fragments dense soil clods, and hence increased the unsaturated conductivity by a factor of 3. The results are of importance for predicting the structure formation and hydraulic properties of soils in prospect of milder winters due to climate change and thus for farmers' seedbed preparation in spring.

How subsoil microorganisms respond to warming is largely unknown, despite their crucial role in the soil organic carbon cycle. We observed that the subsoil microbial community composition was more responsive to warming compared to the topsoil community composition. Decreased microbial abundance in subsoils as observed in this study might reduce the magnitude of the respiration response over time and a shift in the microbial community will likely affect the cycling of soil organic carbon.

This study assesses the controls on soil respiration and the radiocarbon content in soil developed from geochemically varying parent material in African tropical forests. Using incubation experiments, we found that a combination of factors related to soil fertility and the chemistry of the soil solution, organic matter quality, and soil mineralogy drive soil respiration patterns along the investigated geochemical gradients. Radiocarbon signatures predominantly depend on parent material features.

Pollution of French soils by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) known as carcinogenic pollutants was quantified in this work using an extended dataset of 2154 soils sampled across France. The map of PAHs concentrations in French soils revealed strong trends in regions with heavy industries and around cities. The PAHs signatures indicated the influence of PAHs emissions in Europe during the industrial revolution. Health risks posed by PAHs in soils were low but need to be considered.

Forest soils store carbon and therefore play an important role in mitigating climate change impacts. Yet again, deforestation for farming and grazing purposes has grown rapidly over the last decades. Thus, its impacts on soil erosion and soil quality should be understood in order to adopt sustainable management measures. The results of this study indicated that deforestation can prompt soil loss by multiple orders of magnitude and deteriorate the soil quality in both topsoil and subsoil.

Plant organs, such as leaves, contain a variety of chemicals that are eventually deposited into soil and can be useful for studying organic carbon cycling. We performed a systematic review of available data of one type of plant-derived chemical, n-alkanes, to determine patterns of degradation or preservation from the source plant to the soil. We found that while there was degradation in the amount of n-alkanes from plant to soil, some aspects of the chemical signature were preserved.

This work delivers openly accessible and validated calibrations for diagnosing 26 soil properties based on mid-infrared spectroscopy. These were developed for four regions in Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast, including 80 fields of smallholder farmers. The models can help to site-specifically and cost-efficiently monitor soil quality and fertility constraints to ameliorate soils and yields of yam or other staple crops in the four regions in between the humid forest and the northern Guinean savanna.

Zinc deficiency is a widespread nutritional problem in human populations, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Crop Zn depends in part on soil Zn. Zinc status of soils from the Amahara region, Ethiopia was quantified by measuring pseudo-total, available, soluble and isotopically exchangeable Zn and soil geochemical properties were assessed. Widespread phytoavailable Zn deficiency was observed. The results could be used to improve agronomic interventions to tackle Zn deficiency in SSA.

In this study, we show that the variation in a soil spectral library (SSL) can be used to predict soil carbon at new and very different locations. The importance of this finding is that it requires less time-consuming lab work than calibrating a new model for every local application while still remaining similarly accurate as local models. Furthermore, we show that this method even works for predicting (drained) peat soils using an SSL with mostly mineral soils containing much less total carbon.

We present a soil mid-infrared library with over 1,800 samples from central Africa in order to facilitate soil analyses of this highly understudied yet critical area. Together with an existing continental library, we demonstrate a regional analysis and geographical extrapolation to predict total carbon and nitrogen. Our results show highly accurate predictions and highlight the value that our library contributes to existing data. Our library is openly available for public use and for expansion.

This paper aims to reconstruct Middle Bronze Age (MBA) land use practices in the north-western Alpine foreland (SW Germany, Hegau). We used a multi-proxy approach including biogeochemical proxies from colluvial deposits in the surrounding of a MBA settlement, onsite archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data and offsite pollen data. From our data we infer land use practices such as ploughing, cereal growth, forest farming and use of fire that marked the beginning of major colluvial deposition.

In deeply weathered tropical rainforest soils of Africa, we found that patterns of soil organic carbon stocks differ between soils developed from geochemically contrasting parent material due to differences in the abundance of organo-metallic complexes, the presence/absence of chemical stabilization mechanisms of carbon with minerals and the presence of fossil organic carbon from sedimentary rocks. Physical stabilization mechanisms by aggregation provides additional protection of soil carbon.