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Soil Horizons articles

  1. Enhanced Rock Weathering: A bulwark against climate warming?

    Silicate and carbonate weathering by carbonic acid is a key component of the natural, mid- to long-term global carbon cycle. This process plays out in two key environments.

  2. Leaching losses under cropping and variable-rate irrigation

    The intensification of agricultural land typically includes irrigation to increase pasture and crop yields. This is often associated with an increase in nutrient inputs through fertiliser, increased stock numbers, and changing cropping patterns and management practices. However, irrigation and other...

  3. Benchmark results from New Zealand’s soil carbon monitoring programme for agricultural land

    Soil organic carbon (SOC) is critical for soil health. It is the basis of the soil food web and plays an important role in maintaining soil structure, retaining water, and nutrient cycling. Soils are large reservoirs of carbon, and globally they contain more carbon than the atmosphere and vegetation...

  4. S-map expands further and reaches 11 million hectares!

    Last year closed out with a significant achievement for S-map, New Zealand’s comprehensive online resource soil information system. In the latest update to S-map Online, released in August 2024, the coverage of S-map reached 11 million ha, or 73% of the multiple-use land (Land Use Capability classes...

  5. Updated estimates of soil water retention in S-map

    New Zealand is internationally recognised as having a high diversity of soil types, with S-map identifying 4,844 soil siblings (types) in the 41% of the country mapped so far. It would be too expensive to measure a wide range of attributes in the laboratory for all these siblings, so they are only m...

  6. Land use capability back in the spotlight

    In September 2022 the National Policy Statement for Highly Productive Land was released. This targets the safeguarding of New Zealand’s most favourable soils for food and fibre production. A new web service in support of this effort will soon be released.

  7. Soils of Banks Peninsula – large complexity in a small space

    As part of ongoing efforts to extend the coverage of New Zealand’s national soil map, S-map, a team of pedologists from Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research, targeted one of the very conspicuous blank spots on the national soil map – Banks Peninsula in Canterbury. This significant milestone has its ge...

  8. Tactical use of proximal sensing tools for the S-map soil survey

    Although the stony soils of the upper Wairau Valley, Marlborough, have underpinned the success of winemakers, they have made soil mapping there a slow and arduous task. The valley has been shaped by the Wairau River, and its soils have formed in the gravels left behind as the river changed course. A...

  9. A farmer-friendly infiltrometer

    Weather events over recent years have motivated farming, industry, and environmental protection authorities to search for ways to minimise environmental pollution. One way of achieving this goal is to increase agricultural water-use efficiency and manage storm water generation more efficiently on-fa...

  10. Soil judging competition develops skills and knowledge vital to understanding and protecting soil

    You don’t need experience to compete in a soil judging competition, as participants in the second National New Zealand Soil Judging Competition recently discovered. The biennial event, which took place during the New Zealand Society of Soil Science conference in Marlborough in late November 2022, ai...

  11. Guidance on the sustainable management of surplus soils in New Zealand

    ‘Surplus soils’ are those soils that have been disturbed through land and infrastructure development or natural processes (e.g. landslips, silt/sediment) and are unable to be beneficially used on-site. An Envirolink Tools project on surplus soils was carried out from July 2022 to August 2023. The pr...

  12. Development of a semi-automated, inexpensive, climate-controlled plant growth unit

    A plant growth unit is essential for growing plants under controlled conditions so that uniform plant material can be made available for experiments to study plant responses to changing environmental conditions. It provides a controlled environment, including temperature, humidity, light intensity a...

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