Soil Quality In Soil Management

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After mining operations, the change in topography and stripping of vegetation can lead to soil erosion, not only washing precious nutrients away and clogging up waterways with run-off, but also creating unsightly and unusable heaps of dirt. This is why rehabilitation of mining sites is so important, it is important to establish new growth as quickly as possible and allow any land destroyed by mining to be put to better use for forestry or grazing purposes. Coffey says,"It is possible and important to rehabilitate any degraded land, which generally includes mining, where you end up with large amounts of overburden as the final soil profile."Rehabilitation sites helprestores the vegetation that was lost during the mining activities.The most common …show more content…

1997, ArshadandMartin 2002). Soil has two qualities:inherent soil quality where a soil’s natural ability to function and dynamic soil quality where soil changes depending on how it is managed (USDA, 2006). Davidson (2000) noted that soil quality is an important conceptthat will make a distinctive and crucial contribution to soil management.That is why many scientists have been assessing soil quality for many purposes. Soil-quality assessmentis an effective method for evaluating the environmental sustainability of land use and management activities (Nortcliff, 2002).As reported by the Soil Quality Institute (USDA, 2006), the ultimate purpose of assessing soil quality is to protect and improve long-term agricultural productivity, water quality, and habitats of all organisms. But due to disturbances to soil such as building infastractures, cultivating and mining the soil, nutrients are lessened. This greatly affects plants and organisms living in those disturbed

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