Abstract
AbstractArtificial soil (AS) with a dark–brown appearance and high soil organic matter (SOM) was manufactured under hydrothermal conditions from poor sandy landfill using the 'hydrothermal humification process.' This approach may retrosynthesize the natural clay–humin complex, which is the main contributor for water and ion binding in fertile, natural soils. The structure and morphology of as‐created organic–inorganic composites was examined, and it was shown that the as‐created artificial SOM (A‐SOM) indeed tightly binds to the mineral surfaces, thus creating remediated soil or more general AS. A‐SOM does not change the bulk structure of the involved inorganic minerals but activates their surface. Depending on the biomass used as the starting product, the high effectivity of synthetic humification improves the organic carbon and nitrogen content when compared with the employed sandy soil (SS). The composition was adjusted to be comparable with a reference sample of cultivated soil (2.92% in C content and 7.8% in SOM) to enable a fair referencing. We then analyzed the most frequently used soil quality indicators for agricultural land use and found strong water retention and nutrient conservation, which reflects the successful restoration of mineral–humus conjugation. Pure ASs provide superior performance in the analyzed series, whereas simulated soils (mixture of SS and AS) still exhibit satisfactory capacities of water and ion bonding. The values were found to be very similar to cultivated soils sampled from Germany and Harbin, China.
Highlights
Soil can be defined as the medium that provides the foothold and the mineral nutrients for land vegetation, that is, it is the 'dirt' supporting crops (Nikiforoff, 1959)
We describe an attempt to transform poor sandy soil (SS) from a landfill operation into 'new black soil (BS)' through a onestep conversion process, in which the physical and chemical properties of color change and mineral composition and structure are similar to real BS
soil organic matter (SOM) examination of SS, Artificial soil (AS), and cultivated soil is carried out following the procedures: first, the open space was placed in a muffle furnace, burned at 95C for 30 min, taken out and cooled in a desiccator for 20 min, and the mass was weighed; it was burned at the same temperature for 30 min, taken out, cooled, and weighed
Summary
Soil can be defined as the medium that provides the foothold and the mineral nutrients for land vegetation, that is, it is the 'dirt' supporting crops (Nikiforoff, 1959). Black soils, classified as dark chernozems and called mollisols (Yang et al, 2019), are one of the most fertile soil resources for crop production in the world, and there are only three major black earth soil regions in the world. Besides the Northeast China black soil (BS) area, there are two others in the great plains of Ukrainian Plain of Eastern Europe (generally referred to the forest grassland and grassland BS zone of the former Soviet Union) and the Mississippi River Basin of the United States. The area of BS in the great plains of Ukraine and the Mississippi River Basin of the United States is about 1.90 and 1.20 million km, respectively.
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