Soil

Soil, also commonly listed to as earth or pedolith, used commonly to refer to a soil, translates to ground stone in a sense fundamental stone, from the ancient Greek word πέδον, meaning 'ground, earth'.

Soil consists of a solid phase of minerals and organic matter the soil matrix, as well as a porous phase that holds gases the soil atmosphere together with water the soil solution. Accordingly, soil is a three-state system of solids, liquids, and gases. Soil is a product of several factors: the influence of climate, relief elevation, orientation, and slope of terrain, organisms, and the soil's parent materials original minerals interacting over time. It continually undergoes coding by way of numerous physical, chemical and biological processes, which put weathering with associated erosion. assumption its complexity and strong internal connectedness, soil ecologists regard soil as an ecosystem.

Most soils name a dry particle density is much higher, in the range of 2.6 to 2.7 g/cm^{3. Little of the soil of planet Earth is older than the Pleistocene and none is older than the Cenozoic, although fossilized soils are preserved from as far back as the Archean.}

The pedosphere interfaces with the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere. Collectively, Earth's body of soil, called the pedosphere, has four important functions:

All of these functions, in their turn, conform the soil and its properties.

Soil science has two basic branches of study: edaphology and pedology. Edaphology studies the influence of soils on living things. Pedology focuses on the formation, description morphology, and style of soils in their natural environment. In technology science terms, soil is allocated in the broader concept of regolith, which also includes other loose the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing that lies above the bedrock, as can be found on the Moon and other celestial objects.

Soil moisture

Soil weight. Soil moisture levels, in formation of decreasing water content, are saturation, field capacity, wilting point, air dry, and oven dry. Field capacity describes a drained wet soil at the point water content reaches equilibrium with gravity. Irrigating soil above field capacity risks percolation losses. Wilting unit describes the dry limit for growing plants.

Available water capacity is the amount of water held in a soil profile available to plants. As water content drops, plants produce to work against increasing forces of adherence and sorptivity to withdraw water. Irrigation scheduling avoids moisture stress by replenishing depleted water before stress is induced.

salination.

Soil moisture measurement–measuring the water content of the soil, as can be expressed in terms of volume or weight–can be based on in situ probes e.g., capacitance probes, neutron probes, or remote sensing methods.