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  • From: Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] FYI/THE STATE AND FUTURE OF U.S. SOILS Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science PRODUCT OF THE Subcommittee on Ecological Systems, Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability OF THE NATIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COUNCIL December 2016
  • Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2016 09:17:16 -0800

THE STATE AND FUTURE OF U.S. SOILS

Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science

PRODUCT OF THE
Subcommittee on Ecological Systems, Committee on Environment, Natural
Resources, and Sustainability
OF THE NATIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COUNCIL

December 2016




https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/SSIWG_Framework_December_2016.pdf
Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science
Executive Summary
Soil is essential to human life. Not only is it vital for providing most of
the world’s food, it plays a critical role in ensuring water quality and
availability; supports a vast array of non-food products and benefits,
including mitigation of climate change; and affects biodiversity important
for ecological resilience. These roles make soil essential to modern life.
Thus, it is imperative that everyone—city dwellers, farmers and ranchers,
land owners, and rural citizens alike—take responsibility for caring for and
investing in our soils. Given their importance, soil must be protected from
degradation, as the alternative is the loss of an array of important
ecosystem services. The Soil Science Interagency Working Group (SSIWG) was
established to support interagency coordination of research activities and
ensure the long-term sustainable use of soil resources.

Enhanced coordination will ensure tools and information for improved soil
management and stewardship are made available, and help land managers
implement soil-conservation practices to maintain, enhance, or restore this
nonrenewable resource. A collaborative, whole-of- government approach will
help inform related policy development and coordination related to soil
research and conservation.

This Framework organizes the key threats to U.S. soil resources into three
broad categories:

 Land-Use and Land-Cover Change, including expansion of urban and industrial
land and infrastructure at the expense of productive lands; management of
resource extraction sites; expansion of cropland into vulnerable areas such
as wetlands; and inappropriate land-use intensification.

 Unsustainable Land Management Practices, including insufficient soil
surface cover, excessive application or poor management of nutrients and
pesticide, poor water management, agricultural and forestry practices that
excessively disturb the soil, and other practices that may degrade soil.

 Climate and Environmental Change, including potential effects of changes in
temperature and precipitation patterns on erosion rates and degradation of
soil organic matter, potential feedback mechanisms from release of greenhouse
gases caused by different forms of soil degradation (such as the drainage of
wetland soils), opportunities for terrestrial carbon

VISION
A future in which the Nation manages its soils to support healthy ecosystems,
vibrant communities, and a secure world.

MISSION
The establishment of a whole-of-government approach for interagency
coordination and collaboration on soil research, conservation, and
restoration priorities.

Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science
sequestration, effects of atmospheric deposition on forest soils, and changes
in invasive species distribution.
To address these challenges, the SSIWG makes five recommendations for future
cross-agency science and technology priorities:

1. Support applied social-science research in soil sciences and enhance
public awareness of soils, including developing incentives for implementing
sustainable soil-management strategies, growing citizen-science networks,
educating potential scientists on the role and importance of soils in human
society, and engaging academics in a wide range of disciplines.

2. Advance the national research infrastructure for soil-data storage,
analysis, and sharing, including standardizing methods for obtaining data,
storing large volumes of data, developing more sophisticated predictive
models, and working with land managers to expand research opportunities.

3. Support a coordinated research effort on the interactions between soils
and the global climate, including better understanding soil-atmosphere carbon
exchanges, improving the resolution of climate models in their interpretation
of soils, and studying the effects of temperature and precipitation changes
on soil properties.

4. Support the expansion of, and increased investment in, long-term research
programs and collaborations to better understand, document, and manage the
effects of land-use and land-cover change on soils, including expanding
existing Federal research networks and long-term studies to include more soil
properties and a wider diversity of land use and land cover types,
strengthening long-term research partnerships with land managers, and
exploring opportunities for developing landscape-scale resilience to
environmental change.

5. Prioritize programs and technical assistance designed to promote
sustainable land- management practices and to minimize unsustainable
land-management practices, including supporting and enhancing Federal, State,
and local conservation programs that provide financial and technical
assistance to land managers for adoption of sustainable practices,
implementing routine review of technical methodologies used by Federal
agencies in assessing soil function and the effectiveness of conservation
practices, developing more-precise and less-expensive sensors for deployment
by land managers, and developing a consistent set of benchmarks and targets
against which to measure progress in protecting U.S. soils.

Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science
Soils: The Foundation for Civilization

The Soil Science Glossary published by the Soil Society of America (SSSA)
defines soil as:
“The unconsolidated mineral or organic matter on the surface of the Earth
that has been subjected to and shows effects of genetic and environmental
factors of: climate (including water and temperature effects), and macro- and
microorganisms, conditioned by relief, acting on parent material over a
period of time.”1
Under natural conditions, one inch of topsoil can take 500 years or more to
form.2
Soil scientists categorize soils into 12 broad classifications called soil
orders (Map 1: Soil Orders of the United States.3) The soil characteristics
that define these orders are fundamental to each soil’s ability to provide
ecosystem services and govern responses to different management practices. A
wide range of land-use and land-cover conditions occur across the United
States (Map 2: Land Uses and Land Cover in the United States).
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Resources Inventory
(NRI) groups the U.S. land-use and land-cover classes into six broad
categories: crop land, pasture, rangeland, forest land, developed land, and
other rural land. Federal lands are treated as a separate category in the
NRI, as is land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a USDA
conservation program that retires agricultural land to protect its natural
resources (Figure 1: Land-Use Distribution in the United States).

This document focuses on land use and management rather than land ownership,
so Federal land and CRP land are not treated separately. The interaction of
inherent and dynamic soil properties with existing and potential
land-management practices across the Nation are the basis for this document.
The ecosystem services provided by a soil vary among land uses. There is a
common need for the development and implementation of management strategies
that maximize the ability of a specific soil to provide the desired services
for the future and to reduce the risks of irreversible negative effects on
that soil. In working lands (crop land, pastures, rangeland and much of the
Nation’s forest lands), the primary management objective is to provide food
and fiber for a growing world population. The most significant challenge is
to minimize negative effects such as soil erosion and loss of organic matter
as well as unintended on- and off-site environmental risks resulting from
inappropriate application of agricultural inputs (such as fertilizer and
pesticides).

A Brief History of Soil Management in the United States
The Dust Bowl period of the 1930s, which devastated agriculture throughout
the Great Plains, resulted from a severe drought, the effects of which were
magnified by poor land management in the region. The event caused a severe
loss of ecosystem services and agricultural productivity. In response to this
crisis, the U.S. Congress established the Soil Conservation Service in 1935
(which later became the Natural Resources Conservation Service) through the
Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act.4 The Act authorized USDA to
administer conservation programs and acquire lands to conserve their soil, to
encourage “...the protection of land resources against soil erosion.5”

With these actions, the Federal Government began what
Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science
would become a long-standing policy of encouraging and supporting the use of
conservation practices on agricultural land.
New pressures on soil resources have emerged as a result of changing societal
needs and norms. For example, the co-development of new crop varieties and
more efficient irrigation equipment has facilitated the expansion of
high-yield and high-input agriculture into more arid and cooler areas,
creating new threats to soils that formerly had been managed less intensively
for livestock production or lower-input agricultural systems. The pursuit of
additional acreage for crop production has led land managers to drain wetland
soils to expand agricultural activity, often causing significant soil loss
and carbon release to the atmosphere.6 The growth of bioenergy and
bio-product markets and the rise of industrial-scale confined livestock
operations have also contributed to the spread of monocrop agriculture
(primarily corn) through wide swaths of the central United States.7 These
changes in cropping systems have decreased species diversity, which can lead
to accelerated soil degradation.8 Furthermore, as urban populations continue
to expand, demand for more housing and urban development has increased
pressure on agricultural or forested lands; the associated increase in
impervious land cover in these areas creates challenges for both soil and
water management. Industrial activities, including mining and resource
extraction, also continue to present soil-management challenges.

Many Federal agencies have conducted research and developed programs to
address these issues. A few examples include:
1) Agricultural soils: Within USDA, NRCS, the National Institute of Food and
Agriculture (NIFA), and Agricultural Research Service (ARS)) have
implemented—and continue to implement—coordinated programs of field and
laboratory research, demonstrations, outreach, and financial assistance to
quantify and control soil erosion processes better. Programs have focused on
designing appropriate management practices (such as terraces, waterways, and
reduced- and no-tillage systems) and working with landowners to support
implementation of these practices. Although erosion continues to be an
important resource issue, significant improvements were made in the late 20th
century (Maps 3a and 3b: Sheet and Rill Erosion in the United States). Even
though erosion management has been a primary focus for USDA agencies, most
are now trying to develop a better understanding of biological and physical
processes in soil.
2)
Urbanandindustrialsoils:Brownfieldsaresitesthatmaycontainhazardoussubstances,
pollutants, or contaminants due to prior human use. To remediate soils at
these sites, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) developed the
Brownfields Program to provide grants and technical assistance to
communities, states, tribes, and others to assess, safely clean-up, and
sustainably reuse previously contaminated sites. Cleaning up and reinvesting
in Brownfields protects human health and the environment and takes
development pressures off greenspaces and working lands. EPA estimates
450,000 to 1,000,000 Brownfield sites exist nationwide9—but only about 17,000
sites have applied for and received grants for assessing or cleaning up the
contamination (Map 4: Brownfield Sites across the United States). These
investments have been successful;
5
FOR PUBLIC COMMENT
Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science
every dollar invested in the Brownfields program has leveraged $17.79 in
additional investment,10 and as of 2014, Brownfield investments have led to
the creation of over 97,000 jobs.11 Other Federal agencies also work to
protect urban soils; for example, NRCS has expanded its work on soil mapping
into urban areas to further characterize soils that exist in close
interaction with human populations. The Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and
Analysis (FIA) program also surveys urban sites.
3) Contaminatedsites:TheDepartmentofEnergy(DOE)operatesdozensofresearch
facilities across the country that manage large quantities of contaminants,
including radionuclides, toxic metals, organics, and dense liquids such as
mercury.12 DOE’s inventory of degraded soil and debris is 40 million cubic
meters.13 The Department invests hundreds of millions of dollars each year to
ensure the appropriate cleanup of contaminated soils, and the Office of Soil
and Groundwater Remediation operates research programs to develop improved
technologies for solving specific technical challenges associated with
contamination. For example, DOE’s proposed Fiscal Year 2017 budget includes
an additional $3 million to help develop and test technologies to stabilize
mercury pollution in soil from activities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.14
Public Perception of the Importance of Soil
Soil is one of the least recognized national resources. No mascot along the
lines of “Smokey the Bear” has widely popularized the importance of soil. The
benefits of soil are more likely to be recognized only after they have been
degraded or eroded, or after extreme events— such as landslides or land
subsidence—have occurred.
Soil is often viewed as “just dirt,” and the general public rarely hears of
the importance of healthy soil or soil ecosystem services, but in fact, it is
one of three pillars—along with water and air—of the Earth’s capacity to
support human life. That this precious resource is underappreciated is due in
part to an increasingly urbanized society that separates people from soils
and the services they provide. Raising awareness and engaging the public on
the complexity and importance of soil ecosystem services could lead to better
soil management decisions at the local level, more support at all levels of
government for efforts to protect soil, and opportunities for scientific
workforce development. Educating the public on the different roles soil plays
beyond agriculture in, for example, filtering drinking water, storing water,
supporting the plants that provide oxygen, and mitigating climate change, is
also important.

In addition to increasing overall public awareness of the importance of soils
to human society, addressing the needs and concerns of farmers and other land
managers and increasing their knowledge of practices that protect and improve
soils remains a significant challenge. While every grower knows the
importance of soil, there can be considerable resistance to changing
soil-degrading practices.

Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science
The State of the Nation’s Soils
The United States features diverse soil types, formed over time by
site-specific factors including local climate and hydrology, biological
activity, topography, and geologic parent material (referred to collectively
as soil forming factors). Different soil types vary in their sensitivity to
degrading practices, the rate at which ecosystem services can be regenerated,
the management practices that will enable restoration, and the level of soil
function that can be restored.

Soil Degradation
Soil degradation is a general term often applied to the process of rendering
a soil incapable of providing its expected level of ecosystem services.
Originally, the term was applied to agricultural productivity, but the
concept has expanded to cover the broader range of services that soils
provide. Degradation reduces the availability of soils for food and fiber
production, water filtration and storage, carbon sequestration, and other
important ecosystem services upon which society depends. In many instances,
degraded soils can be remediated by implementing improved management
practices or soil amendments, such as organic matter, that ameliorate
physical or chemical limitations. Degraded soils can take hundreds or even
thousands of years to recover naturally.15 For example, organic matter
depletion is a common type of degradation in agricultural soils, commonly due
to intensive tillage that is often accompanied by leaving the land uncovered
in the non-growing season.

Changes in management can halt and often reverse soil organic matter losses.
Soil Loss across the United States
Soil loss, primarily through wind and water erosion, can be thought of as the
most extreme type of soil degradation, as its effects cannot be alleviated by
simply replacing lost soil with soil from another location. An inch of soil
can take more than 500 years to form,16 and since soil is also a living
community and the microbial community structure needed for healthy and
functional soil varies by location and use, physically replacing lost soil
with soil from another location is not enough to restore its function. The
average rate of soil erosion from cropland decreased by over 30 percent from
1982 to 2012,17 the last year for which NRI data are available (Figure 3),
largely due to the adoption of reduced tillage management by a growing number
of farmers. Despite this improvement, the current estimated rate of erosion
(an average of 4.6 tons per acre per year18) results in significant soil
losses. These estimated losses are not evenly distributed, with some areas of
the country still experiencing average losses of nearly twice that amount19
(Maps 3a and 3b).

Soil formation rates cannot on their own offset the current rates of soil
losses due to erosion. Despite numerous attempts to quantify the rate of soil
formation under a wide range of conditions, the only consensus from these
efforts is that soil formation rates are highly variable. Recent estimates
suggest that average soil formation rates are close to 0.5 tons per acre per
year.20,21 Therefore, it is not possible to rely on natural soil formation
alone to make up for the high rates of soil loss in agricultural and other
soils.

Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science
Current Availability and Quality of Federal Data on Soils
Considerable data document the state of soil resources in the United States.
The primary source for soil information is the Soil Survey Geographic
(SSURGO) database, which is accessible through the USDA’s Web Soil Survey.22
This database, maintained by NRCS, contains hundreds of estimated properties
for soil landscapes and components that cover over 90 percent of the
continental United States mapped at a 1:24,000 spatial scale. The State Soil
Geographic (STATSGO) database, also distributed through Web Soil Survey,
provides a smaller set of estimated properties for the entire country at a
1:250,000 scale. The spatial resolution of the chemical data in SSURGO is
sufficient for large, homogeneous landscapes, but in variable terrain with
multiple soil parent materials, such as those found in much of the East and
Mountain West, this dataset is limited. Therefore, SSURGO data usually do not
provide detailed information on surface waters or forest conditions, nor
provide useful estimates of soil-carbon storage; however, NRCS continues to
invest in improved soil resource mapping programs that are expected to help
resolve current limitations.

The National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS) Soil Characterization database
contains measured data on over 1,000 soil properties obtained from over
63,000 sites throughout the United States and the world, though measurement
is limited by low spatial resolution in many parts of the country.23 The NCSS
also contains calculated data on many other soil properties. All of these
datasets are based on consistent, well-documented standards and
specifications. NRCS is able to leverage significant information on global
soil resources through international collaborations, including with the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Global Soil
Partnership and international organizations such as ISRIC—World Soil
Information.
NRCS also maintains the NRI, a longitudinal sample survey of the Nation’s
land-use characteristics based upon statistical principles and procedures.
The NRI is conducted in cooperation with Iowa State University’s Center for
Survey Statistics and Methodology. Current estimates cover the contiguous 48
States, Hawaii, and parts of the Caribbean. Separate estimates also cover
Alaska. The NRI approach to conducting inventories facilitates examination of
trends in rural and developed land characteristics and uses over time,
because:
• the same sample sites have been studied since 1982;
• the same data have been collected since 1982;
• the inventory accounts for 100 percent of the surface area;
• quality assurance and statistical procedures are designed and developed to
ensure that trend data are scientifically legitimate and unambiguous; and
• it is easy to track lands as they change in their characteristics and uses.

Key information collected over time includes land cover and use, water and
wind erosion, and wetland characteristics, paired with soil properties. The
NRI’s applicability, however, to developing responses to threats to soil
ecosystem services is limited, because it is principally a land-use database,
not a soil-property database, and therefore lacks detailed information about
soil characteristics.

Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science
Another USDA agency, the Forest Service, leads the FIA, which produces an
annual survey of the state of U.S. forests, including forest soils, and
reports on issues such as land-cover change, carbon sequestration, and
effects of pollutants and fires. The survey includes approximately 125,000
plots for core data collection, of which approximately 7,800 are sampled
intensively and include forest-health and soil characteristics.

Several public-private collaborations aggregate and analyze large quantities
of soil data. For example, scientists have created the International Soil
Carbon Network (ISCN), a platform working to develop a globally integrated
database of soil carbon measurements.24 ISCN partners with several Federal
programs, including the interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program
(USGCRP) and the NSF-funded National Ecological Observatory Network
(NEON)25,26 (NEON’s scientific steering group includes several U.S. and
foreign government agencies as well as universities and research
institutions.) Federal agencies including EPA, DOE, and others host numerous
other datasets. Despite all of these efforts, however, many existing datasets
lack the requisite resolution for effective policy and soil-management
decisions, and many higher- resolution datasets are regional and lack
integration into national databases.27

The United States lacks a single clearinghouse for soil data or
infrastructure for intercomparison of heterogeneous datasets, especially
those containing data collected via different methods and with different
goals (for example, when two researchers measure the same properties at
different depths).

Aggregation and intercomparison are inherently difficult due to the wide
range of soil properties, the varying degree of importance of each property
depending on the location and land-use or land-cover type, scale, and the
different research needs for different soil-management goals. For example,
the Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) satellite is designed to measure soil
moisture to a depth of 5 centimeters, while a hydrologist might study
groundwater flows down to 10 meters. Ensuring data are discoverable
(searchable through metadata formatting and the use of Digital Object
Identifiers to tag datasets) and accessible (allowing for consistent data
formats and methods of installation and synthesis) is also challenging. An
important component of a planned interagency approach to managing soil
resources will be the coordination of these types of datasets across Federal
agencies to maximize the discoverability, accessibility, and usability of
information and analytical tools on which to base important policy decisions.

A Global Perspective on the Importance of Soils
The historical success of American agricultural, livestock, and forestry
production rests largely on the Nation’s highly fertile soils. Mollisols,
which are among most productive soils in the world,28 are also the most
common soils in the United States, comprising approximately 22 percent of the
Nation’s land area but less than 7 percent of global land area.29 Generally
formed

Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science
under grassland vegetation, Mollisols contain high levels of organic matter
that store large amounts of carbon and nutrients important for plant health.
The especially rich soils of the United States provide American farmers,
ranchers, and foresters a considerable competitive advantage over producers
in other regions of the world.

Many parts of Africa, for example, struggle to produce adequate food from the
continent’s widespread highly-weathered and nutrient- depleted soils.30 Only
about 16 percent of Africa’s soils are optimal for crop and livestock
production31,32 (see Map 5, Global Soil Orders), while the rest present one
or more major challenges to successful agriculture, such as low levels of
organic matter or high acidity. Farmers managing such soils are vulnerable to
crop and livestock losses during droughts and extreme weather events. These
losses can lead to famines or severe food shortages that are less likely in
the United States. Through Federal agencies such as the U.S. Agency for
International Development, the Federal Government helps countries around the
world avoid such tragedies by supporting agricultural development projects,
many of which focus on helping smallholder farmers conserve and improve their
soils.

Due to the global nature of both the threats to
soils and their diverse roles in society, a range of
international entities exist to address soil
sustainability issues directly or indirectly. Among them are the FAO, which
operates the Global Soil Partnership and the Intergovernmental Technical
Panel on Soils (ITPS); the United Nations Convention to Combat
Desertification (UNCCD), which combats land degradation around the world; and
the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)’s International Resource
Panel (IRP). These entities work with countries around the world to produce
data and databases for use in addressing important soil-related research
questions.
://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ssiwg_framework_december_2016.pdf

<http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ssiwg_framework_december_2016.pdf>


  • [permaculture] FYI/THE STATE AND FUTURE OF U.S. SOILS Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science PRODUCT OF THE Subcommittee on Ecological Systems, Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability OF THE NATIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COUNCIL December 2016, Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, 12/06/2016

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