December 2, 2019 – There are many reasons why soil scientists dig soil pits. They all revolve around collecting information to address a question or a management problem. And sometimes they hold more questions than answers. The Soil Science Society of America’s (SSSA) December 1^st Soils Matter blog looks at one soil scientist’s experience that left more questions than answers in Colorado.

“In the summer of 2017, I was working as a range technician for the U.S. Forest Service, Bighorn National Forest in northern Wyoming,” says blogger Ryan Schroeder. He and another scientist needed collect a trail cam that was monitoring animal populations in “The Bowl” near Bald Ridge. While there, they dug a soil pit to “practice our soil description skills. The soils in Bighorn impact the quality of the natural forage grasses that support grazing animals and the water quality of this National Forest. The Bowl is at about 10,000 feet in elevation.”

“We found a few gullies and erosional features around the foot slope of the ridge as it came down into The Bowl,” says Schroeder. And what they found was surprising: pieces of wood charcoal in the lower layer of the soil pit.

“Such a change in texture and soil color normally means that this bottom layer of soil was once at the top and was then buried.”

To learn more about soil scientists digging pits to learn about locations, read the entire post here: https://soilsmatter.wordpress.com/2019/12/01/how-can-soil-scientists-tell-the-history-of-a-location-from-a-soil-pit.