Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Soil Science
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
This paper presents an end-to-end workflow for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of multilingual stakeholder workshop data related to soil health. Stakeholder workshops often produce diverse qualitative and ordinal data which is difficult to process consistently and transparently, especially in multilingual settings. The proposed workflow provides clear guidance for collecting, [...]
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 [...]
Evaluating global spectral unmixing techniques using imaging spectroscopy data for retrieval of green, non-photosynthetic vegetation, and soil fractional cover
Published: 2026-03-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Soil Science
Global estimates of fractional cover of green vegetation (GV), non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV), and soil provide valuable information about the Earth system. As the new generation of Earth visible-to-shortwave infrared (VSWIR) imaging spectrometers take orbit, global fractional cover data will be obtainable with new and improved spectral unmixing algorithms. Using an ASD Field Spectrometer [...]
An analysis of landslides in Great Britain using soil texture, rainfall, and topography reveals contrasting failure conditions between organic and mineral soils
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Rainfall-induced landslides cause millions of pounds in damage to infrastructure in Great Britain (GB) annually and occasionally result in human fatalities. However, there are limited guidelines or policies aimed at reducing landslide risk in GB and few studies have broadly characterized landslide incidence across the region. Furthermore, peat landslides, which are a phenomenon that occur almost [...]
Terra Preta de Índio as an Emergent Ecological State: Reclassifying a Path-Dependent Attractor from Constructible Substrate
Published: 2026-02-28
Subjects: Soil Science
Terra Preta de Índio (Amazonian Dark Earth) has resisted reproducible replication despite decades of study. This perspective advances a falsifiable hypothesis: Terra Preta is not a replicable substrate but an emergent ecological state arising from path-dependent processes over centuries. It appears to occupy a deep attractor basin characterized by persistent fertility, resistance to leaching, [...]
Dynamic critical groundwater depth as a predictor of irrigation-intensified salinization in lowland Hungary
Published: 2026-02-27
Subjects: Agriculture, Hydrology, Soil Science
Shallow groundwater in continental lowland environments sustains upward capillary fluxes that transport dissolved salts to the land surface. However, the depth below which this capillary-driven contribution becomes negligible, often parameterized as the extinction depth in groundwater model ET packages, has been treated as a static, soil-dependent parameter. We argue that salinization risk is [...]
Smoothing Earth’s surface: the complexity of soil texture class transitions
Published: 2026-01-27
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Dynamical Systems, Dynamic Systems, Environmental Sciences, Non-linear Dynamics, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Ordinary Differential Equations and Applied Dynamics, Soil Science, Statistical Models, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
Soil depth functions are essential for analysing, modeling, understanding and visualising soil profiles. While robust methods existed for continuous properties, soil texture is typically reported as discrete classes, and no established approach exists to interpolate soil categorical information with depth. Here, we introduced phySplines, a physics-informed, analytically solvable spline for [...]
Assessing the Impact of Wind Erosion in Baringo County, Kenya
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Geomorphology, Soil Science
Wind erosion poses substantial threats to soil health and agricultural productivity in arid and semi-arid environments globally. In response to the escalating environmental challenge of wind erosion, this study, centered in Baringo County, employs a blend of remote sensing and GIS techniques alongside the Revised Wind Erosion Equation (RWEQ) model. The study spans a 25-year period, with a main [...]
Peatland Mid-Infrared Database 1.0.0
Published: 2025-10-06
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Soil Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Systematic collections of peat mid-infrared spectra and other peat properties are scarce, but useful to understand peat chemistry and develop spectral prediction models. The Peatland Mid-Infrared Database ('pmird') stores 3877 mid-infrared spectra of peat, peat-forming vegetation, and dissolved organic matter, together with measurements of other peat properties that were collated from previous [...]
Reconciling remote sensing and reanalysis land surface temperatures: How surface conditions shape bias between GOES-16 and MERRA-2 across the contiguous US
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Hydrology, Life Sciences, Meteorology, Soil Science
Land surface temperature is a key variable governing land–atmosphere energy and water exchanges. Despite its importance, satellite observations and reanalysis products often differ in how they define the effective depth of land surface temperature and in the assumptions underlying their estimates, making comparisons and interpretation challenging. In this study, we present a detailed comparison [...]
Low-cost autonomous chambers enable high spatial and temporal resolution monitoring of soil CO₂ exchange across landscapes
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Meteorology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Soil Science, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Soil CO₂ flux is a critical component of ecosystem carbon cycling, but due to high cost and mechanistic constraints, existing measurement systems are often limited by trade-offs between resolution (temporal and spatial), and spatial coverage. These constraints hinder efforts to monitor soil fluxes across diverse, heterogeneous landscapes and environmental gradients. 2. We developed Fluxbot [...]
Simulated Soil Respiration is Sensitive to Soil Hydraulic Properties from Intact vs. Repacked Cores
Published: 2025-07-05
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Hydrology, Soil Science
Soil hydraulic properties, such as water retention and hydrodynamics, play a pivotal role in regulating belowground carbon (C) storage by influencing microbial activity and nutrient availability. However, empirical measurements of these properties are labor-intensive and often fail to replicate field conditions in laboratory settings. Standardizing and increasing the throughput of hydraulic [...]
Solution of the Bloch Equation Based on Spectral Diagonalization and Matrix Exponential Integration: Modeling of SSFP for SNMR
Published: 2025-05-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Hydrology, Soil Science
We present a spectral-diagonalization-based matrix exponential integration (SD-MEI) algorithm for efficient and stable solutions of fully coupled Bloch equations in surface nuclear magnetic resonance (SNMR). Conventional explicit numerical methods exhibit cumulative discretization errors and escalating computational costs due to step-size dependence and finite precision limitations. SD-MEI [...]