Soils as a record of the past

Abstract

The European Geosciences Union (EGU) is Europe’s premier union of geoscientists. The EGU General Assembly attracts over 11,000 scientists each year. ‘Soil as a record of the past’ is the name of a subdivision of the Soil System Sciences (SSS) division introduced in 2012 at the General Assembly of the EGU held in Vienna (Austria) on 22–27 April. The aim of this subdivision is to bring together results regarding soils used as potential records of both natural and humaninduced processes occurred during the past centuries or millennia, as well as to create a permanent forum of stimulating scientific debates on this topic. Generally speaking, soils are subjected to the effects of soil development and landscape evolution. Consequently, a soil map is just a snapshot of the spatial distribution of soil types during the soil inventory. Soil classification systems, as the World Reference Base (WRB) and the Soil Taxonomy, are based on actual soil properties and neglect relicts of previous phases in their development, obviously because in the past the main focus of soil mapping was the agricultural purpose. However, time and environmental changes have a strong impact on soil evolution, and this information can be, in some cases, recorded throughout the profile. Today’s soil profiles may contain relicts from previous phases during soil evolution and subsequent landscape development, while the formation of palaeosols stopped at the moment of burial. That makes soils and palaeosols, if undisturbed, valuable geo-ecological, geo-archaeological, palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic archives. Also organic soils (and peat soils, in particular) are valuable records of the past, mainly because of the peculiar conditions characterizing these particular environments, including the low rate of organic matter decomposition, and the generally acidic pH and anoxic conditions. To obtain information from soil archives, various techniques can be employed. Traditionally, botanical and ecological fingerprints could be obtained, for example, by coupling data from pollen analysis, fossil plant remains, testate amoebae and radiocarbon agedating, but the applications in soil studies of new approaches, e.g., micromorphology, microbiology, inorganic and organic geochemistry, and techniques, e.g., stable isotope signatures, radiogenic isotope signatures, biomarker analysis and luminescence dating, can provide further relevant information. On the occasion of the EGU General Assembly 2012, researchers and students involved in interdisciplinary soil science studies were invited to submit abstracts to the session SSS10.2. Soils as a Record of the Past. This session, convened by Claudio Zaccone (Univ. of Foggia) and co-convened by Jan M. van Mourik (Univ. of Amsterdam), Carlo Barbante (Univ. of Venice) and Sjoerd J. Kluiving (Univ. of Amsterdam) (http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/ EGU2012/session/9994), received numerous contributions