#soils

Soil chromatography

these are the names of eldritch gods i think

Terres, 2023

Dessin, graphite sur canson

@ADGAP

You have asked one of the most complicated (and fascinating) questions someone could possibly ask, which I’ve also been trying to figure out. So! I have spent days looking through Environmental Microbiology (Pepper et al., 2015) to wrap my mind around it.

Here’s a suitably unhinged delve into soils, which are the most complicated and diverse ecosystem on the planet :’) are rapidly disappearing and can take hundreds of years to form. And a bit about why I started Pamela with cyanobacteria.

Tldr: YES?

If these are real, oligotrophic Soils, nitrogen (which is usually the most limiting thing plants need from soil) you would need enough to be about 12% of each dry cell’s weight. So, you would have to provide your own nitrogen fertilizer or use all the available nitrogen, probably inorganic nitrogen salts, Or it just wouldn’t grow in the first place.

So, while certain ecological concepts are just as solid and evidence/mathematically-based as any other hard science, there's a lot more room for interpretation and application of those concepts.

Like, okay - Soil Science. Pedology (yes... etymologically unfortunate there) - Study of soil formation, development, and classification/frameworks for understanding. Really well-organized science, similar to taxonomy and evolutionary biology in organisms.

But there's a a major debate in that field with no real set answer: "Do constructed soils count as actual soils?" (ie: Soils not developed through natural processes, but purposefully (or even unintentionally) placed by human actions/activity).

Most commonly seen in reclamation ecology, but also things like disturbed soils in agricultural environments, things like landfills/garbage dumps/ or perhaps even could technically be applied to battlefields or buried ruins.

There is one camp that's firmly "We're here to talk about natural development and integration. They're not natural and don't really integrate. Therefore, not soils, end-of."

Meanwhile you have another camp that's "They're in the environment. They have an effect. It doesn't hurt to have the language to formally characterize them. Plus over the years, presumably they will start to integrate with neighbouring soils and they may have effects on them already, so understanding how they work in comparison and conjunction to natural soils is going to be important."

(If it wasn't obvious, because I'm kinda bad at hiding my bias here - I fall firmly into the latter camp. I feel it's probably easier to have this mindset as someone who was just learning the system anyway, rather than someone entrenched in it for years/decades. No attachment to "tradition" and what have you).

Another ecological debate I remember from a more-overall ecology subject - About ecosystem restoration/preservation:

Should we be looking to maintain/restore to previous conditions - Prior to disturbance/maintaining habitat for specific species, etc. Or should we be looking to build/maintain for what new/emerging conditions are? Hell - Should we even be arrogantly meddling out of our sense of guilt at all?

For one example - Pine forests as a whole have been in decline - There's forestry, sure, but that's managed and less of an issue today than other factors like fire control - Most pines in boreal forests have their reproductive cycles adapted to the natural fire cycles of those forests. But humans get nervous about large fires, especially those which might spread to stuff we've built, so we control and prevent them. Without the regular fires, the heat-activated cones don't open and seeds don't germinate. Or, the accumulated litter and deadfall hasn't been regularly burnt, so the fires have tons of fuel when they do break through and burn hot and long enough to completely destroy an area. Plus, climate change means that winters aren't cold enough for long enough to kill the mountain pine beetle, which kills pines before they can produce cones/in a way that doesn't activate their cones. Whitebark pine is especially hit hard by this. Plus, changing conditions might be less-favourable overall for the growth of pines.

So, what can we do about it? We plant the seeds/seedlings (if we can get them to germinate and grow in lab/greenhouse in the first place), we try to contain/eliminate invasive mountain pine beetle, etc. We do controlled burns on the forest. We keep learning and developing new ideas and techniques to make sure these species and biomes persist in our world.

But... The world is changing to pointedly *not* favour these pines/forests, apparently. Wouldn't it be better to let succession take place and work with whatever now grows best in this region, under this climate, pest, and fire regime? Fighting the tide of change won't work forever, right? Maybe we find and cultivate a species or two of pine that thrives under these conditions and lean into them instead?

And the third position basically says - Yes, this is our fault, ultimately, but so what? It's supremely arrogant of us to think we actually have any clue what we're doing when it comes to environmental management - Especially on an ecosystem-level scale. For all we know, our ham-fisted fix attempts are actively making things worse. Better to just try to limit our initial impact but let the ecosystem sort itself out now that conditions have changed.

It's the same logic as "Clearly pandas aren't built for this world and almost want to go extinct? Why fight so hard to prevent that?"

Of course, that this position has a sort of view of the Pre-Columbian-contact Americas as pristine nature - Which just isn't accurate. We know that the First Nations practiced environmental management through actions like fire control and controlled burns. It's just taken formal European/colonial history and science far too long to recognize the deliberate impacts of the First Nations people (y'know, just like as with other aspects of those disciplines - A longstanding pattern of being too dismissive of First Nations' ability to activately understand and direct their own outcomes). Partly because of First Nations' tendency towards oral tradition instead of written records and for a nomadic/semi-nomadic lifestyle instead of building permanent cities recognized as such by European colonists. Partly because of, well, no way of getting around it - Deliberate attempts at genocide/cultural genocide wiping out many people and their knowledge before it could be passed on. With oral tradition especially, that can badly disrupt the historical record/chain of knowledge.

There's really no such thing as "pristine, undisturbed" nature in the Americas, once humans had spread through the territory. When left completely one, the forests (and other ecosystems) do no grow like how they grew prior to European settlement. So it does come down to a question of *what* management activities we want to take.

"None" is as valid of an answer as any - But it doesn't have the historical precedent many thought it did/still think it does. And it's probably not going to lead to the outcomes they expect.

This overall question has less of a clear-cut answer in my mind honestly - Is there a point of no-return for ecosystems that we should learn to recognize and accept, rather than wasting more resources and effort? Do the calculations change if it'll only lead to local extirpation as opposed to complete extinction? Is it better to create something definitely sustainable under the new conditions, or do we fight to keep species from being pushed from regions they've been in, out of a desire to keep ranges from shifting/changing/and especially - Shrinking?

World Soil Day 

Types of soil are categorized by a variety of features, including the amount of organic material, how readily water is absorbed, and how easily the soil can be worked. As soil scientists developed a classification scheme for the soils of the world during the late 20th century, they ultimately recognized twelve soil orders (the coarsest tier in the classification scheme). There were soils typical of grasslands (mollisols), deserts (aridisols), bogs (histosols) and so on. One of the last soil orders to be added to the list, in 1989, were soils in which volcanic ash was a major component. These are the andisols which comprise only around 1% of ice-free land surface in the world. In the continental United States, these soils are almost entirely within the Pacific Northwest. Many soils at Mount Rainier are andisols.

What does all of this mean for the plants and landscapes of Mount Rainier? In general, the glassy minerals in volcanic ash tend to result in soils with high water and nutrient holding capacities. Similar to how rivers deposit nutrient-rich sediments after flooding, episodic volcanic eruptions (whether from Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, or Mount Mazama) deposit new nutrients in the form of volcanic ash. The downside of these volcanic ash-rich soils at Mount Rainier is that the resultant glassy sand tends not to have much internal cohesion (as opposed to clay). This makes the soils easier to erode. Often the only protections these volcanic ash-rich soils have from erosion are plant cover and, sometimes, a cryptobiotic soil crust formed from algae, fungi, or lichen. All of these are vulnerable to disturbance and destruction by foot traffic. Help protect the unique soils of Mount Rainier by staying on trails!