Is pedology dead and buried?

Abstract

Pedology, the field study of soils as natural landscape bodies, has suffered serious cutbacks in stang and funding in many developed countries. Soil survey, a strong focus for pedology, has been most affected by this recession. The cutbacks to pedology reflect the reduction in funding for general purpose soil resource inventories and a decline in central government planning and land development, as well as changing needs for soil information and perceived failure of soil survey to respond by delivering relevant, timely information at affordable cost. A refocusing of research effort in pedology is required to contribute to research into environmental issues of sustainable land management, and global change processes and impacts. The adoption of modern, ecient approaches to collecting, analysing, interpreting and presenting field soil data will improve the fund-raising capability of pedology and enhance its institutional stature. The general purpose paper soil map and soil survey report has largely been superseded as a medium for presenting soil information. Increasingly, it will be replaced by computer-generated, special purpose, interpretive soil maps that are based on soil–landscape models and include more objective, statistically estimated information on soil variability. There is a continuing role for pedology to define the extent, distribution, properties, suitability, and vulnerability of soils as a basis for sustainable land management. There is a need for increasing focus on temporal changes in soil properties, greater attention to soil properties that determine soil functioning and influence soil use, and interpretation of the environmental record contained in soils and regolith.