The Soils Laboratory Manual, K-State Edition is designed for students in undergraduate, introductory soil science courses, and highlights the many aspects of soil science, including: soil genesis and classification, soil physical properties, soil-water interaction, soil biology, soil chemistry, and soil fertility. The lab manual includes 15 different laboratories, each one starting with an introduction and pre-lab assignment, followed by in-lab activities, and complimented by post-lab assignment. In-lab activities involve field trips, experiments, observation stations, or problem sets. Post-lab assignments include online quizzes, problem sets, or laboratory summary reports.

Students will learn how to collect quality soil samples and how soil testing is done

This lesson will extend the learning on rocks with the Foss kit, Pebbles, Sand, and Silt to include soil. Students will perform the soil sifting activity like the one designed for rocks in the Foss it. Through their work, students will complete a Venn diagram of soil and rocks as a class.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The sustainability of the terrestrial ecosystem depends on the stability of its tiniest residents. The terrestrial microbiome controls functions such as organic carbon turnover, nutrient-use efficiency, and productivity, and losing critical keystone functions may cause dramatic shifts in microbiome composition and function. A recent study sought to better understand the relationship between biodiversity and microbiome stability. Researchers inoculated microbial communities differing in phylogenetic diversity into sterilized soil and evaluated the resulting microbiome stability. They found that bacterial communities with higher phylogenetic diversity tended to be more stable throughout a range of pH values. Specialized metabolic functions, including “nitrogen metabolism” and "phosphonate and phosphinate metabolism,” were identified as keystone functions. These critical functions were carried out by specific bacterial taxa, including Nitrospira and Gammatimonas..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Working as if they are engineers aiming to analyze and then improve data collection devices for precision agriculture, students determine how accurate temperature sensors are by comparing them to each other. Teams record soil temperature data during a class period while making changes to the samples to mimic real-world crop conditions—such as the addition of water and heat and the removal of the heat. Groups analyze their collected data by finding the mean, median, mode, and standard deviation. Then, the class combines all the team data points in order to compare data collected from numerous devices and analyze the accuracy of their recording devices by finding the standard deviation of temperature readings at each minute. By averaging the standard deviations of each minute’s temperature reading, students determine the accuracy of their temperature sensors. Students present their findings and conclusions, including making recommendations for temperature sensor improvements.

Students learn about contact stress and its applications in engineering. They are introduced to the concept of heavy loads, such as buildings, elephants, people and traffic, and learn how those heavy loads apply contact stress. Through the analysis of their own footprints, students determine their contact stress.

In this project, students will assume the role of citizen scientists—helping researchers answer questions about how dandelions acquire beneficial symbiotic microbes from different soil types. Students will collect and transplant dandelions, conduct experiments on dandelion growth and microbe growth, and then submit data to scientists at the Genomics and Microbiology Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The researchers will use these data to supplement DNA and RNA sequencing efforts. Students will receive results from the genetic analyses from a limited set of classrooms whose dandelions had previously been sequenced. By maintaining a connection with researchers, students will have an active, hands-on role in current science. Besides aiding scientists with research, students will also create their own inquiries.

Published by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, the 600-page manual covers practical aspects of organic farming and gardening, applied soil science, and social and environmental issues in agriculture. Units contain lecture outlines for instructors and detailed lecture outlines for students, field and laboratory demonstrations, assessment questions, and annotated resource lists. Although much of the material has been developed for field or garden demonstrations and skill building, most of the units can also be tailored to a classroom setting.The training manual is designed for a wide audience of those involved in teaching farming and gardening, including colleges and universities with programs in sustainable agriculture, student farms or gardens, and on-farm education programs; urban agriculture, community garden, and farm training programs; farms with internships or apprenticeships; agriculture extension stations; school gardening programs; organizations such as the Peace Corps, US AID, and other groups that provide international training in food growing and ecological growing methods; and master gardener programs.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Soil quality is crucial to sustaining agriculture and maintaining food security. Soil ecosystems involve complex interactions between biological communities, such as microbes, and physicochemical variables, but although living organisms can affect soil health, they are often ignored in soil management systems, running the risk that we won’t detect detrimental impacts of our actions on the soil until it is too late. A recent study shed new light on bacteria living in soil ecosystems. Researchers examined the composition of bacterial communities and physicochemical properties in 3,000 soil samples from 606 sites in New Zealand, covering indigenous forests, exotic forest plantations, horticultural areas, and pastoral grasslands. Their results showed that soil bacteria community composition was strongly tied to land use. Soil properties such as pH, nutrient concentration, and bulk density could be predicted by the bacterial communities present in the soil..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

The best way for students to understand how groundwater flows is to actually see it. In this activity, students will learn the vocabulary associated with groundwater and see a demonstration of groundwater flow. Students will learn about the measurements that environmental engineers need when creating a groundwater model of a chemical plume.

Students will learn about where different types of food come from, why nutrition is important, and how to grow their own food. Students will also learn the basic conditions required for plants to grow, and the importance of human action in maintaining the availability of these conditions.

This activity is a lab investigation where students design an experiment to create rich soil using organic matter, dirt, newspaper and red worms.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Above ground, plants can seem fairly simple, but below, there is a rich world full of hidden activity. To promote their growth, plants secrete chemicals from their roots that can affect the soil and air around them. This helps them adapt to environmental conditions, stressors, and pathogens. But how these chemicals affect the plants’ microbiota is poorly understood. A recent study evaluated chemical interactions between peanut plants and cassava, which are often co-cultivated. The researchers found that cassava plants produced cyanide, which induced stress in peanut plants. This caused the peanut plants to emit ethylene, a volatile hormone that diffuses through gas and water in the soil. Ehtylene, in turn, attracted specific microbial species that helped to remineralize the soil, ensuring that the peanut plants could increase their yield alongside cassava..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Forests are disappearing at an alarming rate, with human activities such as logging being a major cause of this loss. One way China is addressing this problem is through so-called mountain closure, that is, by stopping all anthropogenic activity within degraded forests. But precisely how mountain closure affects ecosystem renewal isn’t well known. To answer this question, researchers have turned their attention underground, to fine roots. By following the status of these structures, they’ve shed light on how forests renew themselves over the decades after human activity is stopped. Plants use fine roots to acquire water and nutrients from soil, which gives them a crucial role in terrestrial carbon and nutrient cycling. Because soil composition is key to ecosystem productivity, changes in fine root abundance are one indicator of a forest’s health. This prompted the researchers to use fine roots to assess how forests fare after closure..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.