Understanding Soil Profiles, Degradation, and Land Use

Posted on Feb 28, 2025 in Geology

Soil Profile: Horizon A

Horizon washed or leached, dark tone. Poor, rich in mineral-humus soluble. 3 sublevels:

  • A0: Raw humus-rich
  • A1: Rich in humus
  • A2: Predominant minerals on the humus

Horizon B

Precipitate dissolved salts of Horizon A tones. Shortage of organic richness of mineral salts.

Horizon C

Bedrock weathering process. Two sublevels:

  • C1: Horizon Bedrock transition, more or less disintegrated
  • C2: Horizon D or horizon R. The full Bedrock deeper.

Land Use

Each kind of soil is suitable for exploitation in a particular way. Specific use of each soil: soil aptitude.

Main Land Uses:

  1. Agriculture: Relatively flat floors that can plow and sow. Salt loss and organic matter is offset by the addition of organic and mineral fertilizers.
  2. Livestock: Marginal and fragile soils not suitable for repeated cultivation. Very abundant in mid-latitude areas.
  3. Forestry: Soil fairly marginal and vulnerable areas, steep slopes or loose soils on moderate slopes (intense erosion processes). Very widespread in equatorial and high latitudes.
  4. Other uses: Urban, Mining, Industrial, Ecological.

Soil Degradation

When the soil loses its vegetation cover, it is vulnerable to attack by erosive forces. Consequence: decreased fertility. This can lead to complete disappearance of the ground floor. Disappearance naturally: For climate change or tectonic orogenic process.

Factors That Influence Soil Erosion:

  • Weather:
    • Water: more erosive agent in our climate
    • Existence of torrential rain
  • Highlight:
    • The existence of steep slopes
    • Slopes greater than 15% easily erodible soils
  • Vegetation: Dense cover dampens the erosion area
  • Loose materials: Highly susceptible to erosion

Erosivity: Capacity of a geological agent of scraping the ground outside.

Erodibility: Vulnerability of soil disturbance.

Major Soil Contaminants

Metals: Because discharges produced by man come from industrial discharges, mining activities, road traffic. Pesticides and heavy metals added to the soil can follow four different routes:

  • May be retained in the soil
  • Can be absorbed by plants and thus incorporated into food chains
  • Can pass into the atmosphere by volatilization
  • Can move to surface water or groundwater

Consequence: toxicity.

Acid Rain Effects:

  • Reduce cycle nutrients to vary its causes
  • Mobilizing toxic elements such as aluminum
  • Increases the mobility of heavy metals
  • Causes variations in the composition and structure of microflora and microfauna

Salinization

Due to misuse of water riego. Fitosanitarios produce pesticide and fertilizer pollution, mainly by: Phosphates, Nitrates, Heavy metals.

Desertification

  • When the process is caused by natural factors
  • When it is caused by human activity

The process of physical degradation, chemical and biological. Gouge vegetation to sustain progressive degradation products. Overexploitation of coastal aquifers: saline intrusion: desertification. Intensive Agriculture and livestock: desertification.

Sample Degradation Soil in a Mediterranean Climate:

  1. Mediterranean forest
  2. Cereal crops
  3. Use herbaceous rangeland
  4. Exploiting the sparse vegetation with goats
  5. Semidesierto or more important ecological soil improductivo.

Desertification in Spain:

National desertización.

  • 1/3: high risk of desertification or high
  • 1/3: risk of desertification of middle to lower
  • 1/3: risk of desertification nula.

Causes of the process of desertification:

  • Relief steep slopes
  • Common torrential rains
  • Plenty of hard clay soil drainage protective policies
  • Shortage of water resources and forestry
  • Ignorance of the consequences they have on the ground some of our activities: Talas excessive, Grazing abuse, improper farming practices, Fire, Construction drawback of tracks and other public works.

Irreversible process? We have expertise and financial capacity to satisfactorily resolve