TY - JOUR

T1 - The “extra pinch” of pseudosand to enhance tropical biogeochemical processes understanding

AU - Kilian Salas, Simone

AU - Meurer, Katharina H.E.

AU - Boy, Diana

AU - Díaz García, Elisa

AU - Woche, Susanne K.

AU - Boy, Jens

AU - Guggenberger, Georg

AU - Peth, Stephan

AU - Schroeder, Paul A.

AU - Jungkunst, Hermann F.

N1 - Funding Information: Motivated by the commitment of authors and early-career researchers who are dedicated to understanding aggregates and investigating soil opacity, we want to express our gratitude to everyone actively involved in uncovering the essence of aggregation and exploring the profound inquiry into the importance and meaning of them. We acknowledge Svenja Roosch for laboratory instructions and Simone Strey for providing the soil samples. All relevant figures and tables in this article have been reproduced with permission from the respective publishers. This research was supported by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) under Grant Number 01LC1824A to 01LC1824F (Project PRODIGY). The funder had no role in the study design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

PY - 2024/4/2

Y1 - 2024/4/2

N2 - Despite knowing better, water-stable aggregates like pseudosands are still disintegrated into their clay- and silt-sized bits and pieces to serve standardization in texture determination. Lacking yet a viable alternative, this deliberately committed mistake seems the contemporary best practice for modeling purposes, which is far from being ideal. Here, we propose this misconception to be a major cause for flawed process understanding of tropical soils, leading to substantial uncertainties in model development. There is enough evidence as to why pseudosands are neither sand nor the plain sum of their clay- and silt-sized units and should therefore better be defined as an additional soil texture class for which properties have yet to be examined across the tropics.

AB - Despite knowing better, water-stable aggregates like pseudosands are still disintegrated into their clay- and silt-sized bits and pieces to serve standardization in texture determination. Lacking yet a viable alternative, this deliberately committed mistake seems the contemporary best practice for modeling purposes, which is far from being ideal. Here, we propose this misconception to be a major cause for flawed process understanding of tropical soils, leading to substantial uncertainties in model development. There is enough evidence as to why pseudosands are neither sand nor the plain sum of their clay- and silt-sized units and should therefore better be defined as an additional soil texture class for which properties have yet to be examined across the tropics.

KW - sand

KW - texture

KW - tropical soils

KW - water-stable aggregates

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85189209811&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1002/jpln.202400090

DO - 10.1002/jpln.202400090

M3 - Editorial in journal

AN - SCOPUS:85189209811

VL - 187

SP - 161

EP - 170

JO - Journal of Plant Nutrition and Soil Science

JF - Journal of Plant Nutrition and Soil Science

SN - 1436-8730

IS - 2

ER -