Fires are common and we usually just think of the effects it has on plants and structures, but what impact can it have on soil. I recently came across a guide book from the US Forest Service that addresses how to evaluate fire impact on soil. Following wildfires in the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of the Interior mobilize Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams to assess immediate post-fire watershed conditions. BAER teams must determine threats from flooding, soil erosion, and instability. Developing a postfire soil burn severity map is an important first step in the rapid assessment process. It enables BAER teams to prioritize field reviews and locate burned areas that may pose a risk to critical values within or downstream of the burned area. By helping to identify indicators of soil conditions that differentiate soil burn severity classes, this field guide will help BAER teams to consistently interpret, field validate, and map soil burn severity.

The guide is here:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/rm/pubs/rmrs_gtr243.pdf

Hans Jenny (1899-1992) was a soils teacher at UC Berkeley, a pedologist. He distilled the factors that drive soil formation into an equation signified as CLORPT. The CLimate, Organisms, Relief, Parent material and Time that create soil. This might all sound academic, but this approach has helped us better understand how soils form from rock or a base material (Parent Material) to become what we see as soil today. And what we will see as soil tomorrow. He was a firm advocate for soil organic matter (SOM) and spent much of his energy showing the value of protecting SOM and how to show its value to not just agriculture, but the landscape and its health. In a 1980 Science magazine letter he said, “The humus capital, which is substantial, deserves being maintained because good soils are a national asset.” It fits right in with our ideas of carbon sequestration today.

He had a real love for soil and an eye for its beauty. He was interviewed back in 1984 for the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation where he shared some of his views.

http://nesoil.com/upload/Hans_Jenny_Interview.pdf

“Over the years I have acquired a kind of reverence for the soil, for the creature-world inside it, and for its character expressed in the profile features.”

“Soil speaks to us through the colors and sculptures of its profile, thereby revealing its personality: we acknowledge it by giving soil a name, albeit in a foreign tongue, but we don't mention our emotional involvements…”

Hans Jenny went “Hollywood” in 1983 by collaborating with David Bellamy of the BBC.  The documentary covers the concept of CLORPT referred to in the interview. It's spoken in a pretty thick English accent, so you might want to read up about the Ecological Staircase that exemplifies soil formation. The transect of soils and plants that are discussed are at Jughandle State Park in Mendocino.

David Bellamy's New World explaining Hans Jenny's CLOPRT, Part 1 y

CLORPT, Part 2

“Soil contains over a thousand different species of lower animals, the earthworms, pill bugs, nematodes, millipedes, termites, ants, springtails, and amoebas, not to mention the millions of molds and bacteria…If all the elephants in Africa were shot, we would barely notice it, but if the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil, or the nitrifiers, were eliminated, most of us would not survive for long because the soil could no longer support us. I can't help thinking of the claim that healthy soils make healthy people, and as an extension, I am intrigued by the thought that good soils make good people, but that notion seems untenable. Well, not wholly so. Working in the garden with spade and hoe soothes the minds of many people….”

“Soil speaks to us through the colors and sculptures of its profile, thereby revealing its personality: we acknowledge it by giving soil a name, albeit in a foreign tongue, but we don't mention our emotional involvements…”

Jenny also studied how we have viewed soil in art over the ages.  He gave presentations on the progression over time of how our views have changed from broad nondescript representations to elaborate characterizations and on to more idealized shapes.  Check out this essay he did for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1968 after years of roaming art museums - The Image of Soil in Landscape Art.

And more on the art of soil through the ages from a different author

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S034181620900112X

Arbor Day - Grant Wood

In Person Ant IPM Workshops 

Program for both workshops

For years, I thought I was seeing fountain grass, an invasive grass that is found in all kinds of wild and disturbed settings.  I was told it got its name because it was the only thing that would grow around communal fountains where people tamped down the earth while waiting their turn to fill their water jugs.  It's a pretty thing and it's been planted everywhere because it is a pretty little thing --- and invasive.  There a whole USDA Guide on Fountain Grass Management.  A pretty thing that has gotten out of the garden and into the wild- https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5410113.pdf

The blue dots are distribution of Pennisetum villosum (Cenchrus longisetus): feathertop.  from Calflora

But no, what I've been seeing has been a cousin called feathertop - Pennisetum villosum or at one time Cenchrus longisetus.

© 2023 Ron Vanderhoff - Calflora

Pennisetum villosum is an ornamental grass that is naturally distributed on hilly areas in warmer regions of Africa in the family Poaceae (http://foc.iplant.cn/). Several species of Pennisetum are popular in the garden for their bottlebrush spikes and cascading foliage. It has been widely planted and is found as escapes (got out of the garden) in California, Arizona, Kansas, Texas and other southern states. There have been more and more sightings in California, and Ventura county leads with the greatest number of observations according to the USDA Plant Data Base (https://plants.usda.gov/home/plantProfile?symbol=PEVI2). Most of the sightings in California have been coastal, so it's interesting that it's found in such diverse environments in other states.  The findings here were made by Alison Colwell at the UC Davis Herbarium, https://herbarium.ucdavis.edu/index.html

It spreads by seed and rhizome, and in a few blinks of an eye, can spread rapidly into new territory.

I am interested to see how far feathertop has spread in the Ventura/Santa Barbara area, and for that matter from Santa Cruz to San Diego.  Calflora has a website, where observations can be reported

https://www.calflora.org/  It's in the top left corner of the Home page "Add Observations".