ENV 202 - Environmental Soil Biology

Credits: 4

This course will incorporate the principles of plant nutrition, soil nutrient availability, soil testing, and the principles of soil-plant- animal interactions and their influences on environmental and agricultural issues of global significance, sustainable agriculture, global climate change, and diversity conservation. The principles of soil chemistry, physics and biology will be used to determine the effects of soil management, agrichemical usage, livestock production, and vegetation on the environment using scales ranging from microsite to watershed. Soil will be studied as a three-phase system to include physical principles and measurements of soil properties, including density, texture, structure, water content, heat capacity, and transport coefficients, with the relationships of urban, agricultural and industrial contamination. This course will provide the physical, chemical and biological fate and transport processes of pollution in soils and to neighboring water bodies by use of modeling and application to landscape scale.

Theory: 4