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Soils will play a central role in mediating the impact of climate change on natural and managed ecosystems.
The book addresses the various responses of soil processes and properties to environmental change and highlights their contribution to the proper understanding of ecosystem behaviour.
Topics include: Soil hydrology; landscape evolution; salinisation; desertification; soil nitrogen dynamics; soil carbon; soil microbiology; soil erosion; crop modelling.
List of contents
Plenary papers.- Soils and global change: an overview.- Relevance of understanding landscape evolution in relation to climate-induced soil behaviour.- Climate change, desertification and the Mediterranean region.- Climate change, soil salinity and alkalinity.- Spatial modelling approaches to evaluate the effects of climate change on future crop potential and land management.- Crop models: principles and adaptations to the problem of climate change.- The effects of climate change on irrigated soils: water resources and solute leaching.- Modelling the effects of climate change on the hydrology and water quality of structured soils.- The potential impact of global environmental change on nitrogen dynamics in arable systems.- Climate change and soil microbial processes: secondary effects are hypothesised from better known interacting primary effects.- Old sediment carbon in global budgets.- Poster papers.- Global climate change and the necessity to 'scale-down.- The agricultural management effects on carbon sequestration in eastern Canada.- Demonstration of the Rothamsted carbon model.- An expert evaluation system to assess agricultural soil erosion vulnerability.- MicroLEIS 3. 2: a set of computer programs, statistical models and expert systems for land evaluation.- Modelling soil erosion on UK agricultural land under a changed climate.- The development of pedotransfer functions for the hydraulic properties of Portuguese soils.- The use of EPIC in a statistical framework for regional analysis of soil responses to climate and management.- Effect of climatic changes (CO2, temperature) on grassland ecosystems: first five months' experimental results.- Significance of two soil components of the pedosphere as carbon sinks.- The role of site characteristics, species and soilhorizon on the evaluation of carbon contents of forest soils.- Statistical study of soil respiration: calculation of present day rates and anticipation for a double CO2 world.- Demonstration of SUNDIAL: simulation of nitrogen dynamics in arable land.- Seasonal climatic variability and upward nitrate movement in Greek soils.- Standard operation procedures for sampling and sample treatment of soils for environmental specimen banking.- Summary paper.- Soils and climate change - where next?.
