Essential soil physics

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Soils are the Earth's porous skin, composed of solid, liquid, and gaseous phases, playing vital roles as filters, buffers, habitats, and resources for food and raw materials. Their dynamic nature is crucial for biological, biogeochemical, and physical processes, yet they are vulnerable to human activities and degradation. This textbook, based on the 4th German edition, offers a comprehensive introduction to soil physical processes, covering the origin and dynamics of soil properties such as volume-mass relations, grain and pore size distributions, permeability, and storage capacity for water, gases, and heat. It emphasizes soil mechanical properties to understand soil stability and deformation effects on physical functions. Detailed discussions on water, gas, and heat movement in soils and their interactions with solid phases form the foundation of soil behavior models. The book addresses global soil threats impacting food security, exploring the effects of soil use and degradation on transport processes and options for protection and conservation. By integrating soil mechanics with traditional topics, it bridges the gap between general soil science and specialized foundation engineering. It also introduces recent analytical methods beneficial for enhancing plant growth and crop yield. This resource is valuable for researchers, upper-level undergraduates, and graduate students in various fields, with problems at the end of eac