Soil at school project – Department of Geography at University of São Paulo

Forest soils, where soil formation has been influenced by forest vegetation, are generally characterized by deeply rooted trees, significant ‘litter layers’ or O horizons, recycling of organic matter and nutrients, including wood, and wide varieties of soil-dwelling organisms. There are also soils now covered with forest vegetation, often plantations, on lands that were not naturally forested. These soils are probably undergoing processes that give them ‘forest soil-like’ characteristics, e.g., litter layers from trees, woody organic residues from deep roots, and associated soil microbe and fauna populations. Like other soils, forest soils have developed, and are developing, from geological parent materials in various topographic positions interacting with climates and organisms. Forest soils may be young, from ‘raw’ talus, recent glacial till or alluvium, or ‘mature,’ in relatively stable landscape positions. Just as forest vegetation of the world varies greatly, so do forest...

Texture  - The particles that make up soil are categorized into three groups by size:  sand, silt, and clay . Sand particles are the largest and clay particles the smallest. Although a soil could be all sand, all clay, or all silt, that's rare. Instead most soils are a combination of the three. The relative percentages of sand, silt, and clay are what give soil its texture. A loamy texture soil, for example, has nearly equal parts of sand, silt, and clay. Structure  - Soil structure is the arrangement of soil particles into small clumps, called "peds". Much like the ingredients in cake batter bind together to form a cake, soil particles (sand, silt, clay, and organic matter) bind together to form peds. Peds have various shapes depending on their “ingredients” and the conditions under which the peds formed: getting wet and drying out, freezing and thawing--even people walking on or farming the soil affects the shapes of peds. Ped shapes roughly resemble ba...

WHAT IS SOIL? Soils are complex mixtures of minerals, water, air, organic matter, and countless organisms that are the decaying remains of once-living things. It forms at the surface of land – it is the “skin of the earth.” Soil is capable of supporting plant life and is vital to life on earth. Soil, as formally defined in the Soil Science Society of America Glossary of Soil Science Terms, is: The unconsolidated mineral or organic material on the immediate surface of the earth that serves as a natural medium for the growth of land plants. The unconsolidated mineral or organic matter on the surface of the earth that has been subjected to and shows effects of genetic and environmental factors of: climate (including water and temperature effects), and macro- and microorganisms, conditioned by relief, acting on parent material over a period of time. So then, what is dirt? Dirt is what gets on our clothes or under our fingernails. It is soil that is out of place in our world...

Hello guys! Starting the activities of this blog, nothing more fair than a presentation about who we are and what we want! The research project on Soil Education, started in the Department of Geography of USP, under the initiative of Prof. Dr. Déborah de Oliveira in 2010. At the beginning there was only one student who started the research, in 2011 another 3 students joined us, constituting our group. Soil education is often forgotten in schools, or treated in a simple way, which can generate students disinterest. We will disseminate in this space the results of our research, guidance to teachers, experiments and exchange of experiences for soil education, after all it is a finite natural resource, as many others that must be respected and preserved. Beyond academic research we want to disseminate and make accessible materials and teaching methods that help teachers, students, and even other researchers in Soil Education. We will do this by addressing the subject of soil in a ...

Soils in regions of Andean Arid Climate    In July, I made a trip to Bolivia and Peru, and I came across totally adverse and unusual landscapes and weather. The dry climate at this time of year and the altitude transforms the landscape into a beautiful desert surrounded by mountains with snowy peaks.                                   (Mariana Franco de Carvalho 07/2012) But what interests us here is to observe one aspect of the Andean landscape, which immediately catches our eye, the desert soil. As a didactic example, I will take as an example, the city of Arequipa in Peru. Arequipa is located at the foot of the Misti volcano (with more than 5800 m of altitude) its urban site is close to the Coastal Desert of Peru, with maximum annual temperature not exceeding 23ºC and minimum low temperature of ...

Good afternoon friends, Today I am going to present a little bit of a fieldwork I did in the Grand Canyon (USA).                                          Photo by: Déborah de Oliveira, 2012.   Geology and slope strongly influence the formation of Grand Canyon soils, so they are classified as underdeveloped. The soils are highly variable, ranging from the soils of the humid forests of the Northern Rim to shallow. The Grand Canyon is formed by several layers of sandstone, schist, limestone, and so on. Erosion, mainly by water (and ice) and second by wind, were responsible for carving the Grand Canyon. Other forces that contributed to the formation of the Canyon are the course of the Colorado River itself, volcanism, climate variations. The Grand Canyon National Park, near the city of Flagstaff, I consider the most interesting place to visit because there is a geo...