New Soil Science Blog at University of Western Australia

Andrew Rates (UWA) has started a blog for UWA's caffeine-dependent Soil Science Journal Club. It is a closed forum, intended for "UWA Higher Degree by Research students and UWA staff only." This is the type of idea that we could see perpetuating similar efforts at other schools and research groups.

The idea of this blog is to record the progress of a journal club, and preferably to provide an ongoing resource for people interested in recent advances in Soil Science and related disciplines.

I have in mind running a Journal Club for interested postgraduate students and staff. I would like to focus on recent significant advances and developments in Soil Science, preferably including all subdisciplines (soil biology, soil chemistry, soil physics, pedology, ...).

Articles are likely to be sourced predominantly from premier / high-impact journals such as Science, Nature, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Earth and Planetary Science Reviews, etc. This isn't to say that we can't access the more traditional soils journals, but I'd like (at least at first) to focus on big-picture, high-impact issues.

There is a promising post here of the group's first discussion subject: Marris, E. 2006. Putting the carbon back: Black is the new green. Nature 442:624-626 . It seems to me these folks are asking the right questions.

I have added this site to my (frightfully short) list of soil science blogs.