Forest Soil

Forest soils are generally characterized by deeply rooted trees,

significant “litter layers” or forest floors (O horizons), and
recycling of organic matter and nutrients by wide varieties of
soil-dwelling organisms.

From: Reference Module in Earth Systems and Environmental

Sciences, 2013

Abstract
Forest soils are influenced by forest vegetation, climate, parent
material, and other organisms. Soils provide physical support,
supply nutrients and moisture for growth, and store elements for
recycling back to trees. Diverse plant materials comprising
forest floors are habitats for animals and microorganisms, and
facilitate and buffer precipitation inputs. Soil organisms digest
organic matter and mix it with mineral soil, contributing to soil
structure, porosity, and nutrient availability. In aggregate
worldwide forest floors and soils hold more organic carbon than
any other components of any other terrestrial biome.
Management practices and natural disturbances can affect all of
these soil properties.

Keywords
BiogeochemistryCarbon storageForest managementForest
soilsMycorrhizaeNutrient cyclingSoil organic matterSoil
organismsSustainabilityTree roots
James R. Boyle is Professor Emeritus, College of Forestry,
Oregon State University. He has 50 years of experience in forest
soils education, research, lecturing and writing. He has dug in
soils in most regions of North America, Finland, Arctic Sweden,
central Europe, the Amazon and Chile, New Zealand, China and
Malaysia.

Robert F. Powers is Scientist Emeritus, Pacific Southwest

Research Station, Redding, California. He has more than 50
years of experience in silviculture and forest soils research,
writing and lecturing in North and South America, Australia,
New Zealand and China. He is the originator of an innovative
international network of research establishments, “LTSP” sites,
to investigate properties and processes controlling long-term
forest productivity (see:
http://www.fs.fed.us/research/docs/water-air-soil/soil-
productivity.pdf).

Both have been recognized by peers as Fellows of the Soil

Science Society of America.

☆
Change History: June and July 2013. JR Boyle and RF Powers
revised and expanded the text and Further Reading, and added a
number of new figures.

Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

FOREST SOILS
J.R. Boyle, in Encyclopedia of Soils in the Environment, 2005
Introduction
Forest soils, where soil formation has been influenced by forest
vegetation, are generally characterized by deeply rooted trees,
significant ‘litter layers’ or O horizons, recycling of organic matter and
nutrients, including wood, and wide varieties of soil-dwelling
organisms (Figure 1). There are also soils now covered with forest
vegetation, often plantations, on lands that were not naturally forested.
These soils are probably undergoing processes that give them ‘forest
soil-like’ characteristics, e.g., litter layers from trees, woody organic
residues from deep roots, and associated soil microbe and fauna
populations. Like other soils, forest soils have developed, and are
developing, from geological parent materials in various topographic
positions interacting with climates and organisms. Forest soils may be
young, from ‘raw’ talus, recent glacial till or alluvium, or ‘mature,’ in
relatively stable landscape positions. Just as forest vegetation of the
world varies greatly, so do forest soils, e.g., they are shallow, deep,
sandy, clayey, wet, arid, frigid, or warm. The following are
representative of variability in properties of forest soils, complied for
the forest soils of the Douglas fir region of northern California, Oregon
(Figure 2), Washington, and southwestern British Columbia: soil
depths, 1–2.5 m; nitrogen contained in forest floors, 170–
1300 kg  ha−1; total N in soils, 1460–22 500 kg ha−1. There are forest
soils classified in all the orders of the US soil classification system,
reflecting the wide range of conditions in which forests occur.

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Figure 1.  Beech (Fagus sylvatica) forest in Germany.
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Figure 2.  Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) forest landscape in Oregon,

USA.

Forest soils have been studied by many generations of soil scientists.

Some studies have been focused mainly on ecologic characteristics,
for example on surface organic layers in forests in Denmark, which
introduced the terms ‘mor’ and ‘mull’; while other investigations have
dealt with nutrients, water supplies, soil organisms (especially
mycorrhiza-forming fungi), fertilizer additions, and other impacts of
forest management.
Because human land uses have often appropriated the ‘best’ soils and
landscape positions for agriculture, many forest soils are less than
optimum in properties that control fertility and potential vegetation
productivity. This is illustrated by the designation of many forest soils
as ‘steep, stony lands’ during early soil surveys in the US Lake States.
Of course, there are also forest soils with high productive potentials,
i.e., with porous and well-aerated root zones, good nutrient-supplying
and -retaining capacities, excellent capacities to store plant-available
water, and characteristics amenable to robust populations of
soil microbes and fauna. And, in many areas of the world today,
forests grow on lands once used for intensive agriculture, e.g., parts of
northern and central Europe, the northeastern and southeastern USA,
and New Zealand (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.  Pinus radiata plantation in New Zealand. (Photo by B. Dyck.)

Many forest soils are shallow and low in organic matter and water-
holding capacity, on steep, rocky landscapes, in mountainous areas of
the world, e.g., some of the Norwegian and Swedish mountains, the
Alps, the Andes, the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains of North
America, and in arid environments, e.g., in Mediterranean countries,
parts of Chile, Mexico, and the ponderosa pine regions of the western
USA. In large areas of Canada, the US Lake States, Norway, Sweden,
Finland, and Siberian Russia, forests grow on soils that are shallow,
often very wet, on peatlands of several types, and on some soils
with permafrost. These forests are slow-growing, due in part to limited
nutrient- and water-supplying capacities, shallow rooting potentials,
and cold temperatures of the soils.

Forest Soils☆
J.R. Boyle, R.F. Powers, in Reference Module in Earth Systems and
Environmental Sciences, 2013
Abstract
Forest soils are influenced by forest vegetation, climate, parent
material, and other organisms. Soils provide physical support, supply
nutrients and moisture for growth, and store elements for recycling
back to trees. Diverse plant materials comprising forest floors are
habitats for animals and microorganisms, and facilitate and buffer
precipitation inputs. Soil organisms digest organic matter and mix it
with mineral soil, contributing to soil structure, porosity, and nutrient
availability. In aggregate worldwide forest floors and soils hold
more organic carbon than any other components of any other
terrestrial biome. Management practices and natural disturbances can
affect all of these soil properties.

Influence of Forest Harvest on Soil Microbial Communities

Kelsey Martin, in Reference Module in Earth Systems and
Environmental Sciences, 2018
Abstract
Forests soils are important globally for many reasons, including the
relatively large amount of carbon stored in forest soil organic matter.
As a result, disturbance and subsequent changes in nutrient cycling
in forest soils can potentially have large impacts on atmospheric levels
of CO2. Soil disturbance caused by logging can impact both abiotic
and biotic components of the soil, which in turn may impact nutrient
cycling and ecosystem function. Since soil microbes are major
controllers of ecosystem nutrient cycling, understanding how
disturbance impacts soil microbes may help elucidate potential
disturbance effects on ecosystem function. In studies using
early molecular biology techniques like biomass measurements
and phospholipid fatty acids, changes in microbial communities after
forest harvest were unclear. More recent studies using next
generation sequencing technologies have provided greater taxonomic
resolution and information about microbes that are negatively
impacted by forest harvest. For example, bacteria in the phyla
Actinobacteria and Gemmatimonadetes and plant symbionts such as
ectomycorrhizal fungi are generally negatively affected by logging
compared to other groups. Furthermore, there has also been evidence
of changes in microbial enzyme activity after harvest. Decreases in
activity of enzymes involved in the decomposition of organic
matter and other enzymes that play a role in nitrogen and
phosphorous cycling have been observed. Despite these
observations, it remains unclear whether changes in community
taxonomic composition alter ecosystem function via alteration
of microbial activity and function, or if the microbial community is
functionally redundant enough that these compositional changes do
not affect ecosystem function. Future research should combine a
variety of approaches in order to examine community composition,
microbial activity, and soil environmental conditions to gain a full
understanding of ecosystem disruptions and potential long-term
impacts.