Monday, November 13, 2006 - 10:00 AM
99-3

Walking in Milne's Footsteps: Revisiting the Original Catena in Western Kenya.

Lee Burras1, Mary Nyasimi2, and Lorna Butler2. (1) 1126 Agronomy Hall, Iowa State Univ, 100 Osborn Dr, Ames, IA 50011-1010, (2) Iowa State Univ, 111 Curtiss Hall, Ames, IA 50011

The catena is a fundamental concept of pedology.  It ties the distribution of soils across slopes to important pedogeomorphic processes.  Milne introduced and explained the term in the mid-1930's in three separate publications.   These are a 1935 Soils Research article titled “Some suggested units of classification and mapping, particularly for East African soils,” a 1936 Nature article titled “Normal erosion as a factor in soil profile development,” and a 1936 book titled “A Provisional Soil Map of East Africa,”   The impact and value of the catena concept is nearly immeasurable with even a major interdisciplinary journal being titled simply “Catena.”   The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the catena concept still fits Milne's original study sites in East Africa, specifically the upland regions of western Kenya.  The methods used were to revisit his field sites and remap soils across the same slopes Milne explored in the 1930's.   The impetus for doing this study is to evaluate whether classical pedological concepts are useful in areas such as East Africa that have undergone extensive land degradation.