Reasoning about soil as a coupled system is central to graduate training, but is being squeezed out as soil science moves into broader degrees without dedicated specialists. Accessible LLMs make this harder to ignore. We propose four principles for undergraduate teaching: interactivity, place, plural knowledge, and AI discernment, delivered via interactive models, landscape comparisons, Two-Way knowledge, and AI interrogation. Assessment integrates these into place-specific reasoning.

Urban parks store and release carbon, but what controls this process in Mediterranean cities remains poorly understood. We monitored carbon dioxide emissions from soils in three Madrid parks over one year and found that soil moisture, not temperature, is the main driver. Surprisingly, emissions declined at high temperatures, not because heat suppresses soil life, but because hot summers dry out the soil. Keeping urban soils moist is key to managing their carbon balance under climate change.

Soil structure affects erosion resistance and plant growth. This study compared a natural plant derivative and a synthetic polymer as soil stabilizers, using continuous electrical monitoring instead of disruptive sampling. The natural polymer improved soil structure briefly but was quickly degraded by microbes, losing its effect. The synthetic polymer caused lasting changes, including trapped water zones within the soil. This non-invasive monitoring suggests tracking soil changes in real time.

This study demonstrated that biochar (BC) and K-solubilizing bacteria (KSB) significantly improved acidic soil properties and enhanced potassium (K) retention in topsoil by reducing K leaching. Under integrated BC+KSB application, available K and water-soluble K increased by 52.5 % and 49.8 %, respectively. Meanwhile, it also enhanced soil enzymatic activity and promoted beneficial bacterial communities, which are indicating an improved soil health.

Phosphorus shortage limits crop production in many tropical soils. We studied 1,382 soil samples across Nigeria to understand why some soils tightly bind phosphorus while others release more to crops. The results show that climate, organic matter, and iron and aluminum minerals jointly control phosphorus availability. This helps identify where fertilizer is likely to be lost through soil fixation and supports more targeted, efficient, and sustainable fertilizer use.

The concept of soil health is becoming increasingly popular. Yet, the way to measure it remains unclear. We developed a general framework to measure not only soil health (the relative level of an indicator with respect to soil intrinsic potential), which central for sustainable soil management, but also absolute soil quality (the state of an indicator representative of a soil function regarding an absolute maximum), which is necessary in land planning, to match land use with soil capabilities.

Indicators, e.g., of soil quality or health, are routinely used in soil science to guide the management of soils. Currently, it is never made clear which indicators are objective, i.e., independent of the observer’s values and opinions, and which ones are not. In this article, we point out conditions indicators have to meet to provide objective information about soils, and we insist on the need to be upfront about this feature when communicating to the public and to decision makers.

1. Readily oxidized organic carbon and particulate organic carbon were the main factors affecting soil surface electrochemical properties. 2. Biochar enhanced van der Waals attraction while reducing electrostatic repulsion and net repulsive forces, stabilizing soil aggregates. 3. Soil aggregate stability increased with higher biochar application rates, and the beneficial effect of biochar on aggregate stability became increasingly pronounced over time.

We systematically explored the microbial diversity of the three typical soil types (Chernozem, Solonchak and Vertisol) under three different management practices. Study showed that healthier soils host more diverse microbial communities with acidity and mineral content being the main drivers and contributed the missing biodiversity data for Serbia. These findings help us understand soil health better, support more sustainable farming and integrate Serbia into European soil research space.

We combined Rock‑Eval indices, machine learning, and structural equation modelling to identify soil properties controlling carbon thermal stability. These Rock‑Eval parameters (S1, S2, S3′, OI, HI, T50) were handled as response variables; we linked them to soil characteristics. This predictive–causal framework reveals how clay, dissolved carbon, pH, aluminium, and bulk density drive soil organic carbon stability.

Effective strategies are needed to remediate heavy metal pollution while supplying C to maintain microbial activity and soil fertility. In this study,  we reveraled that optimised straw–biochar ratio (1:3) provides a novel integrated approach for remediating heavy metal-contaminated agricultural soils while simultaneously enhancing soil C stability, nutrient availability, and microbial activity. 

Nowadays, minimizing agricultural soil tillage is widely promoted but often leads to lower crop yields. This study combines experimental evidence globally to identify soil-related causes of these yield declines. Results show that minimized tillage, especially without leaving crop residues on the field, can cause soil compaction, limiting root growth and the movement of air and water needed by crops. This suggests that conservation agriculture should only be applied where suitable.

We present a probabilistic compositional framework for farm-scale mapping of soil carbon fractions and totals with calibrated uncertainty. We combine mid-IR, probabilistic gradient-boosted trend and Bayesian SPDE spatial modelling to jointly map POC, MAOC, ROC, TOC, TIC, and TC. The framework preserves the compositional closure of the organic fractions and the mass balance between organic and inorganic carbon while propagating uncertainty from the laboratory through to spatial inference.

Tracking forest soil carbon stability is challenging. We found that field-based visible and near-infrared spectroscopy can rapidly estimate carbon forms. Specifically, models calibrated directly from the field outperform laboratory transfers for regional monitoring, enabling scalable carbon assessment under environmental change.