Soil Taxonomy of Artificial Soils Containing Artifacts Typical of Henan Province
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Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.4137226) and the Special Project of National Science and Technology Basic Research (No.2008FY110600)

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    Abstract:

    【Objective】As of yet Chinese Soil Taxonomy (CST) doesn’t have any explicit diagnostic basis for characterizing soil profiles with artifacts. With rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, the impact of human disturbance on soil is becoming more and more significant. It is, therefore, essential to intensify the research on soils containing artificial artifacts, or it would be very hard to explain reasonably how some changes occur in pedogenesis.【Method】In this paper, 10 soil profiles containing artificial artifacts (shortened as artificial soil) typical of Henan Provinc were selected as objects for the study, including 3 at ancient cultural relic sites, 5 at urban sites and 2 at reclaimed farmland sites in industrial and mining areas.Besides 3 natural soil profiles (free of any artificial artifacts) were chosen in the same regions as control for comparison in configuration and physic-chemical property. Then the 10 soil profiles were classified in line with world soil resources reference basis (WRB) and Soil Taxonomy (ST) and CST and analyzed for soil diagnostic layer and diagnostic characteristic specific of these profiles. On such a basis, a proposed scheme was put forward, applicable to classification of the artificial soils specific of China. 【Result】Artificial soils are complicated in structure and property and vary sharply in particle size, bulk density, pH, and contents of organic carbon, total nitrogen and total phosphorus with type and intensity of human activities. The most intuitive feature is the fact that the content of coarse particles is much higher in the artificial soil profiles than in the natural soil profiles. The urban soils, in particular, are very high in content of coarse particles, up to 90%, and peculiar in soil penetrability, which is hindered by a soil layer formed of miscellaneous construction waste in these soils. In view of the characteristics of these artificial profiles, WRB is found not fully suitable soils because it lacks sufficient modifying prefix or suffix to describe diagnosis of these artificial soils containing artifacts; in ST, soils containing artifacts appear in the various soil orders and subgroups; and CST lacks specific diagnostic basis to describe and explain soil properties of these artificial soils. 【Conclusion】By referring to some standards in WRB and ST pertaining to artificial artifacts in soil, this paper has brought forth a definition for soils containing artificial artifacts, including an augment of “technical disturbance layer” as diagnostic feature, which is added as an index for search of entisol and as a supplement into the definition for the suborder of entisol in CST formulated standards specific to artificial artifacts in CST, and created a new soil group “Technical anthropogenic entisol”, which will be first searched out under the suborder of entisol and three subgroups, i.e. calcareous, acidic and ordinary technical anthropogenic entisal under the group of Technical anthropogenic entisol. Moreover, when artificial soils do not fit in with the diagnostic features described in the preceeding paragraphs, it is suggested that artificial soils should be added as a new type into the soil family to distinguish artificial soils from natural ones. This proposed scheme for soil classification is believed to be able to reflect effects of human activities varying in type on soil, which fills a gap by a certain degree in the study on classification of this type of soils.

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WU Kening, GAO Xiaochen, ZHA Lisi, LI Fangmin, JU Bing, LI Ling, LIU Huan. Soil Taxonomy of Artificial Soils Containing Artifacts Typical of Henan Province[J]. Acta Pedologica Sinica,2017,54(5):1091-1101.

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History
  • Received:August 12,2016
  • Revised:June 07,2017
  • Adopted:June 16,2017
  • Online: June 26,2017
  • Published: