Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Soil Science
Mineral association drives divergent chemical trajectories of organic sulfur during dryland soil development
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Soil Science
Sulfur (S) deficiency is becoming more widespread as atmospheric S deposition declines, increasing ecosystem reliance on mineralization of soil organic S as a source of plant-available sulfate. Yet how organic S chemistry evolves during soil development, and how this evolution is mediated by microbial processing and mineral association, remains poorly understood, particularly in drylands. Here, [...]
Manganese Oxidation States Reveal a Continental-Scale Climate-Driven Redox Gradient in Upland Soils
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Biochemistry, Geochemistry, Soil Science
Soil redox conditions regulate soil organic carbon (SOC) persistence and nutrient availability, yet macroclimatic controls in uplands remain unclear because O2 depletion reflects the interactions of moisture, labile carbon, soil texture, and microbial demand. Here we pair manganese (Mn) oxidation state, an integrative redox proxy, with effective water balance (mean annual precipitation minus [...]
Rapid SRO aluminosilicate formation in a narrow pH interval fractionates silicon isotopes
Published: 2026-07-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Soil Science
Short-range ordered (SRO) hydrous aluminosilicates (HAS) are among the earliest secondary phases formed during incongruent silicate weathering, yet the timescales and silicon isotope (δ30Si) fractionation associated with their initial formation remains poorly constrained. We use stepwise room temperature NaOH titration to resolve pH buffering, Si–Al removal, and dissolved δ30Si evolution in two [...]
Soil acidity governs cropland phosphorus availability under future climate
Published: 2026-07-21
Subjects: Agriculture, Biogeochemistry, Soil Science
Understanding the response of agricultural phosphorus (P) cycling to climate change is fundamental for ensuring global food security and protecting planetary boundaries1–2. Recently, Wang et al.3 reported a drastic reduction in soil P bioavailability (32–34%) under long-term elevated carbon dioxide (eCO2) and warming in rice paddies, attributing it to enhanced geochemical sequestration via [...]
Mechanical Association between Pressure Wave Propagation Time and Constitutive Parameter Damage in Porous Media: Theoretical Derivation and Sensitivity Analysis
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Engineering Mechanics, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Physics, Soil Science
The propagation time of pressure waves in porous media carries critical information about the constitutive parameters of the medium. This study rigorously derives the mechanical relationship between the lag time of pressure wave and the hydraulic parameters of porous media based on the diffusion wave equation. The lag time is shown to be a direct functional of the hydraulic conductivity and [...]
From linguistic evaluation to mechanistic verification: testing LLM-generated farm recommendations
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biogeochemistry, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Soil Science, Sustainability
Large language models (LLM) are increasingly used to generate farm-management advice, but their biophysical consequences remain largely unverified. We introduce a process-based verification framework that combines management portfolios generated by ChatGPT and Claude with the process-based model LandscapeDNDC across 11 contrasting agroecosystems. The LLMs produced agronomically plausible [...]
Field-scale soil moisture over Hungary under non-stationary drought transfer: a unified account across surface, region, and depth
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Soil Science
Three questions decide whether a satellite-driven soil-moisture estimator is fit for operational drought monitoring over a heterogeneous country: how accurately can the surface layer be recovered, whether the controlling processes differ across the landscape, and how far the surface signal reaches into the profile that actually matters for plants and recharge. The program began with a national [...]
Clay Characterization of Tiller Flotten Quick Clay
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Mineral Physics, Other Earth Sciences, Soil Science
In this study, we investigate the mineralogical and physicochemical properties of the Tiller–Flotten quick clay formation in Trondheim, Norway. The objective is to enhance our understanding of particle interactions within this quick clay system, thereby contributing to the development of more environmentally friendly stabilization strategies. A comprehensive suite of analytical techniques was [...]
A Fibonacci-Like Propagation Graph for Infiltration and Internal Erosion in Heterogeneous Layered Soils
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Geotechnical Engineering, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Soil Science
Infiltration and internal erosion in heterogeneous layered soils involve coupled flow, pressure build-up, and material degradation across preferential subsurface pathways. High-fidelity Richards-type simulators are physically detailed but can be too expensive for rapid scenario screening and Monte Carlo uncertainty propagation when hydraulic parameters are poorly constrained. We introduce a [...]
Mineral stabilization of soil organic sulfur at the continental scale
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Declining atmospheric sulfur (S) deposition makes S an emerging limiting macronutrient to plants, yet the stability and dynamics of soil organic S - the largest terrestrial S pool supplying plant-available sulfate via mineralization - remain unclear. Across North American soils, mineral-associated organic S (MAOS), a stabilized pool by mineral protection, dominates (61 ± 26% of the total soil S) [...]
Rapid quantification of fluorescent micro- and nanoplastics (≤2 μm) in soil
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Soil Science
Micro- and nanoplastics (MNP) pose an emerging threat to soil ecosystems, with particular concern for small MNP (≤10 µm). Although small fluorescent MNP are widely used to track MNP distribution and transport in aquatic environments and organisms, analyses of small fluorescent MNP in soil remain qualitative. Here, we present the first direct quantification approach for MNP ≤2 μm in soil using [...]
Erosion-driven changes in soil cation exchange capacity quantified using barium isotopes
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Human activities have perturbed the balance between rates of soil erosion and formation, driving declines in soil quality. However, quantifying these soil imbalances remains challenging, especially at large scales. Here we present a novel isotope mass balance approach that can be used to quantify river catchment wide rates of change in cation exchange capacity (CEC), a key soil quality metric, in [...]
Soil-informed multivariate decision support to assess urban ecosystem service potential
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Applied Mathematics, Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Dynamical Systems, Multivariate Analysis, Natural Resources and Conservation, Remote Sensing, Soil Science, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Theory and Algorithms
Metropolitan expansion across Africa requires robust soil information to support ecosystem services and urban resilience. However, digital soil mapping often prioritises predictive accuracy over identifying where information is reliable for decision making. This study evaluated numerical and South African Soil Taxonomy within a decision framework to assess where ecosystem service inferences can [...]
An End-to-End Workflow for Processing Multilingual Stakeholder Workshop Data: A Soil Health Case Study
Published: 2026-04-11
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Soil Science
Stakeholder workshops often produce diverse qualitative and ordinal data that are difficult to process consistently, transparently, and reproducibly, particularly in multilingual settings. To address these challenges, we developed an end-to-end workflow for systematic processing of multilingual participatory workshop data. The workflow integrates multilingual preprocessing, structured data [...]
Interactive effects of landscape position and soil diversity drive the spatial variability of soil organic carbon concentration in subalpine soils of Switzerland
Published: 2026-03-12
Subjects: Soil Science
Subalpine soils store a significant amount of soil organic carbon (SOC), yet the factors driving its landscape-scale variability remain poorly constrained. Although topography, soil type, soil texture, and moisture are recognised as key drivers of SOC concentration, their interactive effects in subalpine environments remain largely unexplored. In particular, the extent to which soil type shapes [...]