Soils in Natural Landscapes

This book supplies ecologists, foresters, and land managers with a succinct reference to the basics of soil physics, chemistry, and biology with an emphasis on the structure, function, and classification of soils in natural landscapes. Environmental scientists increasingly acknowledge the central importance of soils in ecosystem health and productivity. The book provides a badly needed introduction that covers the basics of soils science including physics, chemistry, and biology of natural soil for scholars and professionals who are not soil scientists.

Earl B. Alexander is a retired pedologist, if you can call writing books (first author of Serpentine Geoecology of Western North America) and professional papers retirement. He has a Ph.D. in soils and has worked for the Soil Conservation Service (now NRCS), the California (now Pacific Southwest) Forest and Range Experiment Station, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the University of Nevada, and three regions of the U.S. Forest Service. He has mapped and investigated soils in Ohio, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Nevada, California, Oregon, Alaska, and other states and provinces in western North America. He has developed interpretations for evaluating soil conditions and expected soil behaviours and made and reviewed recommendations for land management. More than 75 of his papers have been published in professional journals.