Urban Soil:
Urban areas often lack proper soil information, which is often outdated or nonexistent. This is particularly true in areas where urban development has expanded, as the soils have been modified so much that the maps no longer provide accurate information. Soil characterization is crucial in urban areas, as natural resources are used extensively and provide ecosystem services. Modern soil data aids city planners in determining land uses and management practices, impacting human health and quality of life. Collaborative mapping projects and technical soil services address soil data needs. Basic urban soil survey data can guide urban center and suburban management, ensuring optimal soil ecosystem services delivery.
Urban Soil Survey:
We provide national leadership in soil science for urban customers, focusing on populated areas like watersheds, parks, and gardens, providing essential resources to communities.
Phosphorus in Watersheds
Urban watershed balance is crucial for long-term urban sustainability, as it involves sources and sinks of phosphorus. Management decisions within densely populated areas and outlying land uses can cause problems when excess phosphorus outweighs sinks. Urban soil studies are needed to measure and monitor phosphorus transformations, considering urban sources, sinks, non-urban sources, and non-urban sinks.
Understanding soil physics, chemistry, and biology is crucial for managing phosphorus transformation in urban watersheds. This knowledge helps clarify phosphorus transport and adsorption estimates, and urban soil surveys guide users in defining soil information, measuring properties, and estimating soil behavior.
The debate on on-site versus landscape models for urban surveys is ongoing. Recent developments in soil survey can link traditional surveys with intensive ones for high-risk urban areas. The landscape model provides data on water and phosphorus flow, allowing for understanding of long-term ecosystem sustainability.
Research in Urban Soils
Research and development are crucial for soil interpretation, as they help identify changes in mechanistic soil processes as soil behavior changes. Four major areas of research for urban soil interpretation include heavy metal toxicity, landscape, hydrology, sediment and chemical transport, biological transformations of waste, and infiltration linked to heavy use and management.
Ecosystem studies focus on systems, but urban customers often have concerns about specific soil behaviors. Addressing these concerns within the ecosystem context is crucial. Monitoring projects for soils, such as streams and water quality, require a scientific method to help customers understand their concerns. Decision-makers can make better management choices when the balance of inputs and outputs, sources and sinks, stresses, and responses is clear.
Scientific research aims to identify problems, develop ideas about causes, design and implement projects, and use collected information to revisit and test ideas. This approach leads to solutions with minimal risk and improved understanding of soil and ecosystem changes, enhancing customer satisfaction.
Urban Conservation Programs
The urban conservation program involves a mix of agencies and skill-levels in planning and implementing urban projects. The program combines social good, land stewardship, nutritional concerns, and recreational needs to intensify land uses on urban parcels. Risk-sensitive methods are needed to compare soils within urban areas.
Soil survey manuscripts are adapting to urban surveys by updating sample descriptions, adjusting the three-rating system to use fuzzy logic, and addressing modern recreation needs. Traditional concerns like soil limitation, passive recreation, heavy foot traffic, flooding, and boulder avoidance remain, along with more challenging research areas like heavy metal toxicity and contamination plumes.
Urban soils are part of the global soil system as much as are soils under any other landuse. The customer base, however, for urban soil survey and interpretations is in pluralistic urban areas with ethnic variety that complicates the identification of stakeholders, technology transfer to customers of widely differing educational and skill levels, and project timetables that are dependent on multilevel funding networks. These issues are found worldwide, and the need for urban soil information is just as widespread.