Talk:Soil horizon

Stratum links to linguistics

Hey, I'm new to editing Wikipedia, but I just want to point out tht the Stratum link in describing soil horizon C links to aa linguistic article and that probrably isn't right. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chocfudge (talk • contribs) 07:34, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, I removed the link. There is no wikipedia article dealing with soil substratum. The article 'Stratum' is not pertinent either because it discusses geological stratification. One could also delete the word 'Substratum' as this term is not commonly used in soil science.Eleutheropodic (talk) 10:10, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Untitled

what are the different type of soil horizons and there characteristics?

I'll look into it. Also, we could get a picture of a cross section of soil with horizons, eh? Lotusduck 19:37, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Woah, look at that. I think I answered your question. However, someone has to do soil horizon formation, and merge with Horizon Soil. I'll get right on it. Lotusduck 21:39, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

With ever growing and changing terminology, this page does need references. Also, I have made some style screw ups. However, I am still proud of what I just did. Maybe one day someone will fix it up right. Lotusduck 21:54, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

soil is unconsolidated material at the earths crust.

eluviation = loss of materials illuviation = gain of materials

B.E (brown earth)

litter layer fermentation layer organic layer A horizon

.biological active mull
.humas 
.mineral matter

B horizon

.lightly coloured 
.weakly illuviated 

C horizon

. basic parent material
      eg- clay loam

podsol

litter layer fermentation layer organic layer A horizon

.mor humus or raw peat stronly eluviated 
 ash coloured
. mostly bleached mineral grains

BF (iron-pan) often lass than 1 meter thick

B horzon

.strongly illuviated with iron, humus and clay

C horizon

.acid parent material

[[1]]

Revamp time!

Launched a major revision of the article, added a bunch more detail and corrected a few factual errors. This still needs a lot of work - there's no mention of European systems of horizon description, and I don't know enough about the US system to be able to discuss it in sufficient detail (to anyone who is familiar with it: help help!). Due to the number of ways one can describe horizons, I think this article is always going to be a pain in the ass to manage and may eventually have to be split into an article for each system, perhaps leaving this one as a basic intro/start point. It also needs more linkage to articles on various soil formation processes, many of which haven't been written yet. Leobrien 07:08, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Some more crediting of the US Dept of Agriculture would help clarify i think

Hi -- I don't have any prior knowledge of soil layers, but I think that some more crediting / attribution to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture would clarify things for the reader. I understand that the illustration with O-A-B-C layers is public domain, and you don't "have to" give them credit necessarily, but a) it seems to me that it would help the article if the illustration was clearly identified/credited to the U.S. dept of agriculture, and b) the illustration is clearly a creative work itself and it would be very natural to credit it specifically to someone by name or to the organization if the artist name is not available. Several lettering system variations are refered to in the article, which one is this an illustration of?, is a question hanging. Another question hanging is, what artist's illustration is this? Similarly and also, when going on and defining each of the lettered layers in subsections of the article, it is not clear which lettering system that these lettered layers are part of. I gather that there is not a universal, natural, fundamental lettering system, so any one is somewhat arbitrary. It seems then that picking one and explaining upfront and/or in section titles that this is an explanation using the USDA terminology (if that is the one you have chosen) would be helpful to the reader. You could have a further section or footnotes explaining what are the principal differences in the Australian system. Just a suggestion... doncram (talk) 22:51, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

This article has a long ways to go. Because of the current US bias of the article, it would be an improvement to anchor the discussion around the World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB), which defines and designates soil horizons very similarly to USDA soil taxonomy. As a world standard, using terms referenced by WRB moves the article from its current appearance of apparent USA-centricity and arbitrary-ness. (For those reading this and not aware), graphics are credited at their source, in this case at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Soil_profile.png. I have made an inquiry with USDA as to the creation date and the name of the author, currently indicated as an unnamed USDA employee. I am looking for examples of credited illustrations in the style suggested by doncram - it is not yet usual practice at WP to do it in this style, so some pointers appreciated. The distinguishing characteristics of the Australian system is problematic since none of the active editors in the Soil WikiProject have the source needed to address these. The editor who added the P horizon section and other Australian specific references is apparently on an extended wikibreak. The information added is not controversial, so while it would benefit form inline cites, the Australian-specific text need not be removed in the interim.--Paleorthid (talk) 16:39, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Followup: The email response I got from the NRCS webmaster contacted is that the image author's name is not available. He also suggested that that the image be credited "Property of USDA, Natural Resources Conservation Service", which, in the case of this specific image, I am convinced is inaccurate. Pointedly, the public domain status of the image was not explicitly disputed. I have responded with a looongwinded email, pointing to Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code placing works of USDA employees in the public domain, asking for clarification in this area, as well as elaborating why such ownership claims need to be resolved and how we at Wikipedia resolve them. I'll post more when I know more. If the response I get back is that the PD status of the image is in fact disputed by NRCS, I'll remove it until the dispute is resolved. -- Paleorthid (talk) 21:35, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

NRCS has responded saying "The illustration is a product of USDA, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and is not copyrighted. If used, please credit the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service.” Which clears things up nicely.--Paleorthid (talk) 15:19, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Copyright violation

I was reading a textbook for a class, and I came to this Wikipedia article to find out more information. As it turns out it was the same information, much of it word for word. I put the copyright violation template in the Diagnostic Surface Horizons section. I have not evaluated the content of the rest of the article. Falconus^{p t c} 21:28, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, Falconus, for spotting and reporting this. The problems turned out to be more extensive than you had thought, and some parts of the article may now need to be rewritten. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 12:16, 24 September 2017 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed

Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: print sources, including Nyle C. Brady, Ray R. Weil (2004), Elements of the Nature and Properties of Soils. Copied or closely paraphrased material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.)

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@Justlettersandnumbers: You seem to have rendered four years of the article history into oblivion. While I understand (though don't quite agree) that the offending material should be erased from the revision history as well, simple revert to a four-year-old version [2], as you did, was not a prudent thing to do; we're left guessing what was the state of the "healthy" part of the article, which is, I guess, well above 50% of the text, much more than you restored here. Please at least manually restore the version of the article as it was before 24 Sep 2017, minus the offending parts. In that way, we will have the last clean version of the article to work on. No such user (talk) 17:08, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

No such user, I'm sorry but I don't have admin eyesight and so don't have any way of seeing or restoring any content from the compromised part of the history. Reverting to a "last clean" version is a standard method of dealing with substantial copyright violations that cannot simply be excised. In this case, no content added by Jwratner1, a persistent violator of copyrights, can be relied on to be copyvio-free. I thought it (and still think it) "prudent" to remove all of it, even with the collateral damage that that may have caused to good-faith edits by others such as yourself. As far as I can judge from the history, the article was blanked from 14 September 2017 until I cleaned it on 24 September; any editor in good standing was free to work on a copyvio-free version of the page in those ten days, but unfortunately no-one chose to do so. Nthep was kind enough to deal with the revision deletion here; you could perhaps ask him if he would consider temporarily undoing that to allow you to recover any untainted material from the earlier version, or if he would perhaps email you some or all of the former content. May I emphasise that no part of any content added by Jwratner1, whether or not subsequently edited by others, should find its way back into the page (or we're back to square one). I'm truly sorry that work you've done should have had to be removed – it's an unwelcome side-effect of trying to keep the project free of copyright violation. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:41, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

@Justlettersandnumbers: I didn't realize you weren't the revdeleting admin... I went through the revision history since Nov 2013, when Jwratner1 expanded it, and it seems that no one else has placed much other useful contents since – judging on edit summaries and bytes added/removed, there was lot of vandalism and reverting, and some gnomish work. I thought he added only to one section, but it appears most of the contents were affected. So I suppose this is what we have to start with. No such user (talk) 12:38, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

No such user, if it had been just one clearly-defined section that was affected, I'd simply have removed that section. I don't remember exactly now, but my impression is that the edits by the now-blocked editor were both extensive and pervasive. Again, I'm sorry that good-faith edits by you and others should have been lost in cleaning up after him. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 14:19, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

OK. I apologize for the tone of my initial comment, I was rather frustrated – you apparently exercised due diligence. No such user (talk) 14:32, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

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USDA Soil Survey Manual or Field Book for Describing and Sampling Soils

I'm not even remotely a soil expert, but I'm currently researching soil horizons for a class and I came across the Soil Survey Manual, as well as the Field Book from here. I found a notable difference between the two, and that is the SSM contains a "V horizon" while the Field Book does not. Chapter 3 of the SSM says that "V horizons are mineral horizons that formed at the soil surface or below a layer of rock fragments (e.g., desert pavement), a physical or biological crust, or recently deposited eolian material. They are characterized by the predominance of vesicular pores and have platy, prismatic, or columnar structure." Some more reading on this V horizon, or vesicular horizon, [3], showed me that it is a relatively new addition. It also seems to be of some importance. The Soil Science Society of America says that "It is important to study these soils because semi-arid lands cover about one third of the planet’s land area. Soils with vesicular horizons are often disturbed because populations of cities in arid environments are growing. There is construction of solar and wind farms, and these areas are popular for military exercises."

I think it would be a good idea to switch out the Field Book for Describing and Sampling Soils with the Soil Survey Manual for this reason. I would just go ahead and add the V horizon, but that would require me to change the entire source and potentially add/remove some stuff such as about the suffixes, which seems like a really major change for something I know little about, so I want to check here to see what anyone who knows more about soil than me thinks before I go ahead and make the change. Thank you! Untitled.docx (she/her) 🗩 19:38, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

Horizon B

Hey, I'm 12 yr old Brazilian and there is some documentation about Horizon B (Search "MANEJO DE SOLOS – 6340" in Google and you'll find it). My science teacher also said things about it (he's a little crazy tho lol). Thank you :D 189.6.249.230 (talk) 23:51, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Also, he said H was the first layer, but this documentation says otherwise (pg 7) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.6.249.230 (talk) 23:52, 21 April 2024 (UTC)