Podzol
soil type
Podzols, also known as podosols, spodosols, or espodossolos, are the typical soils of coniferous or boreal forests and also the typical soils of eucalypt forests and heathlands in southern Australia. In Western Europe, podzols develop on heathland, which is often a construct of human interference through grazing and burning. In some British moorlands with podzolic soils, cambisols are preserved under Bronze Age barrows.
Term
Podzol means "under-ash" and is derived from the Russian под (pod) + зола́ (zola); the full form is подзо́листая по́чва (podzolistaya pochva), meaning "under-ashed soil". The term was first given in mid-1875 by Vasily Dokuchaev, and over time adopted by soil science. It refers to the common experience of Russian peasants of plowing up an apparent under-layer of ash (leached or E horizon) during first plowing of a virgin soil of that type.
Characteristics
Podzols can occur on almost any parent material but generally derive from either quartz-rich sands and sandstone or sedimentary debris from magmatic rocks, provided there is high precipitation. Most Podzols are poor soils for agriculture due to the sandy portion, resulting in a low level of moisture and nutrients. Some are sandy and excessively drained. Others have shallow rooting zones and poor drainage due to subsoil cementation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Podzol” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.