Soils are affected by human activities, such as industrial, municipal and agriculture, that often result in soil degradation and loss. In order to prevent soil degradation and to rehabilitate the potentials of degraded soils, reliable soil data are the most important prerequisites for the design of appropriate land-use systems and soil management practices as well as for a better understanding of the environment. The availability of reliable information on soil morphology and other characteristics obtained through examination and description of the soil in the field is essential, and the use of a common language is of prime importance. These guidelines, based on the latest internationally accepted systems and classifications, provide a complete procedure for soil description and for collecting field data. To help beginners, some explanatory notes are included as well as keys based on simple test and observations.--Publisher's description.

Provides guidelines to promote the development and implementation of consistent methods and standards for conducting soil and land resource surveys in Australia.

Guidelines for Surveying Soil and Land Resources promotes the development and implementation of consistent methods and standards for conducting soil and land resource surveys in Australia. These surveys are primarily field operations that aim to identify, describe, map and evaluate the various kinds of soil or land resources in specific areas. The advent of geographic information systems, global positioning systems, airborne gamma radiometric remote sensing, digital terrain analysis, simulation modelling, efficient statistical analysis and internet-based delivery of information has dramatically changed the scene in the past two decades. As successor to the Australian Soil and Land Survey Handbook: Guidelines for Conducting Surveys, this authoritative guide incorporates these new methods and techniques for supporting natural resource management. Soil and land resource surveyors, engineering and environmental consultants, commissioners of surveys and funding agencies will benefit from the practical information provided on how best to use the new technologies that have been developed, as will professionals in the spatial sciences such as geomorphology, ecology and hydrology.

A treatise on soil cartography, it deals with methods and techniques, use of computers, and application of statistics for mapping soil cover and covers things required for the interpretation of results obtained, and for determining the most economical itinerary to attain that purpose.

Predictive Soil Mapping (PSM) is based on applying statistical and/or machine learning techniques to fit models for the purpose of producing spatial and/or spatiotemporal predictions of soil variables i.e. maps of soil properties and classes at different resolutions. It is a multidisciplinary field combining statistics, data science, soil science, physical geography, remote sensing, geoinformation science and a number of other sciences. Predictive Soil Mapping with R is about understanding the main concepts behind soil mapping, mastering R packages that can be used to produce high quality soil maps, and about optimizing all processes involved so that also the production costs can be reduced. The online version of the book is available at: https: //envirometrix.github.io/PredictiveSoilMapping/ Pull requests and general comments are welcome. These materials are based on technical tutorials initially developed by the ISRIC's Global Soil Information Facilities (GSIF) development team over the period 2014-2017

This Encyclopedia of Land Use, Land Cover and Soil Sciences is a component of the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. Land is one of our most precious assets. It represents space, provides food and shelter, stores and filters water, and it is a base for urban and industrial development, road construction, leisure and many other social activities. Land is, however not unlimited in extent, and even when it is physically available its use is not necessarily free, either because of natural limitations (too cold, too steep, too wet or too dry, etc.) or because of constraints of access or land tenure. This 7-volume set contains several chapters, each of size 5000-30000 words, with perspectives, applications and extensive illustrations. It carries state-of-the-art knowledge in the fields of Land Use, Land Cover and Soil Sciences and is aimed, by virtue of the several applications, at the following five major target audiences: University and College Students, Educators, Professional Practitioners, Research Personnel and Policy Analysts, Managers, and Decision Makers and NGOs.

Understanding how past and current physical landscape processes, both natural and anthropogenic, affect the archaeological record has become one of the main aims of the burgeoning field of Geoarchaeology. But the ideal of effective multidisciplinary research collaboration is hard to achieve. This second volume of the 'Raganello Basin Studies' series demonstrates how intensive collaboration between earth scientists and archaeologists has resulted in a systematic approach to the description and assessment of archaeologically relevant soils and landscape processes in a typical Mediterranean landscape - the basin of the Raganello River in southern Italy. It is both a detailed report on the extensive field studies conducted by the authors in 2012-2014, and a much needed ?how to' guide to the study of landscapes and soils within the framework of landscape archaeological projects in the Mediterranean. The work described here builds on the expertise in Mediterranean soils and landscapes gained by the first author over decades of research, and avoids or explains jargon that would otherwise deter those with a purely humanities background