Alberta Soil Science
Workshop

More than eighty percent of plants are colonized by soil-dwelling mycorrhizal fungi. In this plant-fungal symbiosis, the fungi provide nutrients, increased drought tolerance and pathogen protection in exchange for plant carbon. This seminar will outline the potential role of mycorrhizal fungi in farming and ranching systems and discuss how common practices, such as fallow, tillage and herbicide applications can influence fungal abundance and function.

First Nations in Saskatchewan hold as much as 4 million acres of reserve land under conventional agricultural production. A decade-old estimate suggests that 80% of this land is farmed by non-Indigenous farmers through lease agreements. First Nations have expressed concerns about degraded soil quality on land leased to non-Indigenous farmers that could reduce land productivity and undermine cultural ties to the land. Although the soils on First Nations reserve lands in the agricultural region of Saskatchewan were surveyed and classified in the 1960s, there is no current data to support or refute claims of soil degradation, or other adverse environmental effects, due to long-term agricultural leasing. Together with Indigenous oral historians, language keepers, and land managers, we are working with two First Nations in Saskatchewan to assess agricultural land use and current soil quality based on conventional soil survey methods—but interpreted through Nêhiyawin (Cree world view) on land. By taking a participatory action research approach, the goals of this transdisciplinary research are to begin filling the gap in knowledge of the impacts of agriculture on reserve lands, to provide updated soil information to communities for future land use planning, and to increase within-community capacity in soil management.

If we relied solely on the iconic paintings by the Group of Seven, our dominant impression of Canadian landscapes would be that the Quaternary glaciations scraped large portions of the country down to bare bedrock – with any surviving soils being both shallow and geologically youthful. In fact, careful examination finds that our landscapes preserve a much more complex mosaic of pedogenic legacies. In trying to understand the imprint of time on Canadian soil landscapes, and quantify rates of soil formation, we can find a much longer and more interesting story than that which is told by the array of documented chronosequences. These seldom span the full Holocene, and occur principally in areas of coastal isostatic uplift and shoreline evolution, as well as on recessional moraine sequences in the Cordillera. Longer (and much messier) sequences, involving soils and relict paleosols on Pleistocene morainal and glaciofluvial surfaces in the central Yukon Territory, record more complex legacies of pedogenesis and landscape evolution, but with much coarser time control and many potentially confounding influences of climatic change and disturbance processes. Elsewhere, older weathered bedrock and regolith can make significant contributions to soil parent materials in several settings: (1) in favoured locations where local conditions protected these materials from glacial erosion in southern Canada, (2) beyond the maximum limits of glaciation, principally in northwestern Canada, and (3) in the Arctic, where cold-based, non-erosive ice allowed preservation of these materials. As we consider the future soil landscapes of our new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, our speculations can be guided by soil-environment relationships across a much wider expanse of the continent. Depending on when our current global fossil fuel experiment ends, we can expect that at least one and perhaps more of the next orbitally-controlled ~100,000-year glacial-interglacial cycles will be cancelled. One consequence is that much of the Canadian landscape will, within 100 millennia, display a pattern of soil cover not seen since the end of the Pliocene, 2.6 million years ago.

The enhanced Alberta Farm Fertilizer Information and Recommendation Manager (AFFIRM) v3 decision support tool is an interactive nutrient management decision support application, which allows the user to evaluate nutrient requirements for crop production based on Alberta research and production economics. AFFIRM is designed to be used by a wide range of users, including farmers, ranchers, crop specialists, farm consultants, industry agents, students and researchers to assist in optimizing fertilizer application rates. The new version has several upgraded features and capabilities that will enhance the users’ ability to evaluate fertilizer and manure management practices. It is now a web-based application, accessible through a web browser using a computer or mobile device such as a tablet. It is accessed through a free basic level My Alberta Digital Identification (MADI) account (account.alberta.ca). The use of MADI allows the user to store and retrieve their specific information in a secure environment.

In this pre-workshop session, the AFFIRM team (Len Kryzanowski, Director of Environmental Strategy and Research, and Symon Mezbahuddin, Geomatics Modelling Specialist of Alberta Agriculture and Forestry) will demonstrate how to use the new AFFIRM v3.0. The attendees can also play with the AFFIRM tool and gain hands on experience on different enhanced and cool features of the new AFFIRM v3.0.