Anthropedogenesis: Pedology's New Frontier.

Pedology was born in the 18th and 19th centuries, when soil was first conceived as a natural body worthy of its own scientific investigation. For well over a century, pedology has purposefully explored soil as a system developed from a complex of natural processes. By the mid-20th century, however, soil changes were being affected by humans and influencing the dynamics of the Earth’s environment. Such anthropedogenesis was first defined as "metapedogenesis" by Yaalon and Yaron (1966), a definition that we propose here to be as important to the development of pedology as the natural-body concept of soil first articulated by Dokuchaev and Hilgard more than a century ago. In this presentation, we consider humanity’s contemporary and historic influences on soil, as it is increasingly important for ecosystem analysis and management to understand contemporary changes that are overlain on those from the past. Although our understanding of global soil change is strikingly elementary, it is fundamental to establishing greater management control over Earth’s rapidly changing ecosystems. Humanity’s transformation of Earth’s soil challenges scientists to develop a pedology with broad purview and decades’ time scale, a pedology based on results from long-term soil experiments, and one in service to the science and management of the environment, ecosystems, and global change.