Abstract:
Pedology was born in the 18th and 19th centuries, when soil was first
conceived as a natural body worthy of its own scientific investigation.
For well over a century, pedology explored soil as a system developed
from a complex of natural processes. By the mid-20th century, however,
human activities began to affect substantial global soil changes with
influence on the dynamics of the Earth’s environment. Such anthropedogenesis
was first defined as metapedogenesis by Yaalon and Yaron
(1966), a definition that we propose here to be as important to the
development of pedology as the natural-body concept of soil first
articulated by Dokuchaev and Hilgard more than a century ago.
In this article, we distinguish between humanity’s contemporary and
historic influences on soil, as it is increasingly important for ecosystem
analysis and management to distinguish contemporary changes that are
overlain on those from the past. Although our understanding of global
soil change is strikingly elementary, it is fundamental to establishing
greater management control over Earth’s rapidly changing ecosystems.
Humanity’s transformation of Earth’s soil challenges scientists to
develop a pedology with broad purview and decades’ time scale, a
pedology that supports the science and management of the environment,
ecosystems, and global change.