This week, I am measuring the texture of the various soils I have sampled from many different projects. Soil texture is important for dryland studies because finer grained soils can hold more water longer. We also find that biocrust recovery occurs more quickly on fine grained soils. We take ~13 g of each soil and remove carbonates and organics. We then use a 53 um sieve to separate sand from the finer grains. The sand can be seen above in aluminum tins. We then separate the silt from the clay by letting the silts fall out of solution (~5 hours). We can then pour off the water and clay, keeping the silts in the bottom of the beaker. We can then calculate the percent sand-silt-clay and classify the soil textures based on the standard system. By doing this analysis at the plot level, we have a more detailed understanding of what is happening in our plots rather than relying on large scale soil texture maps. These 16 samples took me 6 days of lab work, so I hope it is worth it!
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AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
August 2023
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