Researched
Soil science
Soils became a science: Dokuchaev showed in 1883 that soil forms from rock, climate, organisms, relief and time, and can be mapped and classified.
Open in the interactive tree →Justus von Liebig's agricultural chemistry (1840) explained which mineral nutrients plants take from the soil. Vasily Dokuchaev's study of the Russian chernozem (1883) founded pedology, treating soils as natural bodies shaped by five factors. Soil surveys, erosion control after the 1930s Dust Bowl and today's soil-carbon accounting rest on this work.
Prerequisites
- Farming (Neolithic Revolution)~9500 BC
- Geology and deep time1788Soil forms from weathered rock over long periods; soil science grew out of geology
- Mineral fertilizer1840