A Workshop to Establish a Soil Monitoring Network for the Northeastern U.S. and Eastern Canada
The goal of this project was to hold a workshop to initiate the establishment of a network of soil monitoring sites in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. The objective of the network is to aid scientists in documenting changes in soils that are measurable at scales of ten years or even fewer as a result of an ever-changing environment.
An opportunity has developed to begin addressing the need for more information on soil change. Through early efforts to evaluate the effects of acidic deposition on soils, as well as other past ecosystem and watershed studies, soil chemistry has been characterized at numerous locations in the Northeast over the past 30 years. Some of these sites have already been re-sampled, additional re-sampling is currently underway at several locations, and opportunities exist for additional re-sampling throughout the Northeast.
The objective of the workshop was to lay the foundation for a cooperative network that would facilitate data consistency and transfer among sites. Support activities discussed in the workshop included methods standardization, distribution of appropriate reference samples for intra- and inter-lab comparison, maintenance of a common database, development of sample-archiving protocols, creation and operation of a common soil archive or individual archives, and operation of a website for dissemination of information on all aspects of the cooperative. The workshop was also used to begin planning a journal article that would serve as a review paper on the use of soil re-sampling as a method for measuring soil change in North America.