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Manual for soil and water analysis
CATENA ELSEVIER
Catena 30 (1997)251-259
Book Reviews Manual for Soil and Water Analysis. B. Buurman, B. van Lagen and E.J. Velthorst (eds), Backhuys Publishers Leiden, The Netherlands, 1996, xii +314 pp, ISBN 9073348-58-7, Softback. This book gives very comprehensive coverage of the methods in use at the Department of Soil Science and Geology, Wageningen Agricultural University, The Netherlands. It is clearly based on a collection of laboratory exercise notes from different authors, and I have assumed that the audience is the international professional natural science community. That being so, I ask why so little note is taken of the publications of Technical Committee 190 (Soil Quality) of the International Standards Organisation (of which The Netherlands holds The Secretariat) on agreed methods of soil analysis, and the similar efforts of ISO TC147 for water analysis. So far as I could see, none of this work is mentioned in this text, and the few Standards that are given are mostly in Dutch. Numerous inter-laboratory comparisons ('ring-tests') have shown that soil and water analyses are bedevilled by variations in supposedly similar methods. The issue of this 'local' manual will do nothing to help this problem. The book is divided into seven sections. That on water chemical analysis is the largest, followed by soils, with smaller sections on soil bulk density and water retention measurement, sample preparation for XRF and XRD, soil particle size and mineralogical determinations, grain-size by laser diffraction, and the use of soil analyses. The book opens with sections on personnel, safety and QA, but the discussion is not written in practical terms. In the soil analysis section, not enough specific information is given on inter-laboratory proficiency schemes, guidance on the selection, purchase and practical use of Certified Reference Materials, the preparation of 'in-house CRM's, or the allied use of control statistics. Mention in passing is not good enough. Some of this is done much better in the water section, especially that on the preparation of reference waters. Similar well-meant general advice is given about safety. However, 'recipe' books like this tend to be copied in small sections. Thus to put most of the safety material only at the front is thoughtless at best, dangerous at worst. For example, hydrofluoric acid is mentioned on pages 9 and 76, and the safety precaution is rubber gloves (p. 76 only). Nowhere is it mentioned that this acid is unlike others, and far more dangerous, because washing with water of spillages or leakage through pinholes in the gloves onto the skin is not always sufficient to prevent HF burns. These are initially painless and can take hours to become noticed. By that time they may be untreatable leaving the only option major surgery of the affected 0341-8162/97/$17.00 Publishedby ElsevierScienceB.V.
252
Book Reviews
limb (even tiny HF bums are excruciating - believe me). Likewise, the failure to mention the extremely toxic nature of potassium antimony (III) oxide tartrate on page 62 is bordering on the professionally negligent. Warnings for hazards of this nature should be explicit, and repeated - however often - wherever they occur. A large number of the methods, in fact almost all of the water analysis, assumes access to auto-analysers, and a significant amount of the soil carbon and nitrogen analysis is targeted at elemental analysers. Neither are likely to be available in many laboratories around the world, and I question whether they are truly necessary for those with moderate throughput, especially if the service agent is not just down the road. Similarly, some of the methods are written as if specific to one make and model of equipment, with little guidance about principles, or whether the method could be transferred to another machine. This is particularly true of the water analysis section. On that account, therefore, I already began to doubt if this book could be truly useful. Another oddity, in my view, is the unnecessary use of atomic absorption (or emission) where much simpler approaches are perfectly adequate, e.g. in the determination of gypsum, weighing of the precipitate gives an acceptable result (compare the potential errors in this with those of diluting a solution several hundredfold for AAS). Likewise I was somewhat astonished to read of sodium and potassium determinations in water by AAS-GTA - without any advice about biological contamination; you would have to stop breathing at this level of sensitivity. Other methods are idiosyncratic; e.g. why persist with the unreliable Walkley-Black method for soil organic carbon over one such as that of Kalembasa and Jenkinson (J. Sci. Fd Agric., 24: 1085-1090), which gives a far more reliable digestion temperature and better recovery; why determine soil carbonates by titration - what is wrong with a calcimeter (and what about the problem of magnesian carbonates); the uncritical mention of laser particle size analysers for soil analysis is likely to lead to some very expensive and pointless purchases - they do NOT perform adequately on the necessary range of soils compared with widely accepted standard methods. Chemicals can also be obscure. What is the wetting agent 'Brij-35' (page 38), and where does one get it; where do you get 'Superfloc' (page 49 and others) from; similarly, 'Aerosol-22' solution (page 168). Some of the science also seems a little careless. For example, are the authors seriously suggesting on page 7 that the pH value is moisture corrected; how does one weigh 0 mg to an accuracy of 1 mg (page 11); does citrate-dithionite reagent really dissolve gibbsite (page 45) - it never seemed to remove it from my X-ray diffraction traces; why worry about silica in the water (page 60) during P determination - what about the silica dissolved from the soils; Olsen-P is not phosphate - much of it is organically bound P; why use tap water in the laser analyser (page 290) if it causes flocculation; yet again we have reference to sieve mesh sizes (they are mesh apertures) of 5 0 / z m and 100/~m - they don't exist. The apertures are 53 /zm and 106/zm. I shall be accused of pedantry, but science is about precision and accuracy. And this brings me to the most unfortunate aspect of this book, which is, I am sorry to say, the English. The publishers have served the Editors very badly by not making sure that the text was checked by a native speaker. I hardly found a page, especially in the soil sections, free of errors of grammar and spelling, some rendering the text meaningless. This is a pity, because there is useful information, e.g. the sections on sulphur fractionation, water
BookReviews
253
sampling and preservation, reference waters, and sample preparation for XRF and XRD. I am sorry, but I cannot recommend this book in its present form, least of all to professional soil scientists. In my view, this edition should be withdrawn and re-written, with significant parts based on International Standards. It is arguable if such 'local' texts have a place at all in an increasingly internationalised world. They should certainly be questioned as teaching materials. P. Loveland Silsoe, UK
Pll s0341-8162(97)00024-6
Steepland Geomorphology. Olav Slaymaker (ed), John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, UK, 1995, ix + 283 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0-471-95752-6. This is the third volume in Wiley's International Association of Geomorphologists series and the second volume of contributions from the 3rd International Geomorphological Conference which was held at McMaster University, Ontario in August 1993. Its theme is centered on the landforms and processes of 'steeplands', that is, areas of high relief in which geomorphic processes are often highly active and, equally often, highly variable. The term 'steepland' achieved international use through a series of symposia on geomorphic processes in the lands around the Pacific Rim during the 1980s. This volume continues the tradition of those symposia but extends it to a truly global context and a more explicit recognition of geomorphic history and longer time scales than those of the present. Thus, Steepland Geomorphology includes considerations of landscape history and time scales that extend across 10 or 12 orders of magnitude. This broadening of the context of mountain geomorphology should be widely appreciated. Steepland Geomorphology consists of 14 chapters contributed by a total of 35 authors. The editor's Introduction sets the context for and draws broad links between the chapters which follow. These fall into four sections treating in turn: conceptual concerns; sediment inputs to steepland systems; sediment storage; and landform evolution. The first section of the book contains four chapters with a common theme of the varying sensitivities of geomorphic systems over widely disparate timescales. Gilchrist offers a treatment of landscape evolution in southern Africa which extends back to the late-Mesozoic and challenges the classic treatment of these landscapes by L.C. King. The length of this timescale contrasts with those of the three chapters which follow, all of which treat timescales more typical of recent work in geomorphology. In the first of these, Johnson describes the complex response of paraglacial processes in the alpine systems of the Yukon over millennia (the Holocene). The study of contemporary sediment production, storage and yield in the Harlach Valley, central Alps by Becht shrinks the timescale to that of a few years. Finally, the timescale is further shortened in the examination of responses to the eruption of Nevado de1 Ruiz (1985) by Thouret et al.
Catena 30 (1997)251-259
Book Reviews Manual for Soil and Water Analysis. B. Buurman, B. van Lagen and E.J. Velthorst (eds), Backhuys Publishers Leiden, The Netherlands, 1996, xii +314 pp, ISBN 9073348-58-7, Softback. This book gives very comprehensive coverage of the methods in use at the Department of Soil Science and Geology, Wageningen Agricultural University, The Netherlands. It is clearly based on a collection of laboratory exercise notes from different authors, and I have assumed that the audience is the international professional natural science community. That being so, I ask why so little note is taken of the publications of Technical Committee 190 (Soil Quality) of the International Standards Organisation (of which The Netherlands holds The Secretariat) on agreed methods of soil analysis, and the similar efforts of ISO TC147 for water analysis. So far as I could see, none of this work is mentioned in this text, and the few Standards that are given are mostly in Dutch. Numerous inter-laboratory comparisons ('ring-tests') have shown that soil and water analyses are bedevilled by variations in supposedly similar methods. The issue of this 'local' manual will do nothing to help this problem. The book is divided into seven sections. That on water chemical analysis is the largest, followed by soils, with smaller sections on soil bulk density and water retention measurement, sample preparation for XRF and XRD, soil particle size and mineralogical determinations, grain-size by laser diffraction, and the use of soil analyses. The book opens with sections on personnel, safety and QA, but the discussion is not written in practical terms. In the soil analysis section, not enough specific information is given on inter-laboratory proficiency schemes, guidance on the selection, purchase and practical use of Certified Reference Materials, the preparation of 'in-house CRM's, or the allied use of control statistics. Mention in passing is not good enough. Some of this is done much better in the water section, especially that on the preparation of reference waters. Similar well-meant general advice is given about safety. However, 'recipe' books like this tend to be copied in small sections. Thus to put most of the safety material only at the front is thoughtless at best, dangerous at worst. For example, hydrofluoric acid is mentioned on pages 9 and 76, and the safety precaution is rubber gloves (p. 76 only). Nowhere is it mentioned that this acid is unlike others, and far more dangerous, because washing with water of spillages or leakage through pinholes in the gloves onto the skin is not always sufficient to prevent HF burns. These are initially painless and can take hours to become noticed. By that time they may be untreatable leaving the only option major surgery of the affected 0341-8162/97/$17.00 Publishedby ElsevierScienceB.V.
252
Book Reviews
limb (even tiny HF bums are excruciating - believe me). Likewise, the failure to mention the extremely toxic nature of potassium antimony (III) oxide tartrate on page 62 is bordering on the professionally negligent. Warnings for hazards of this nature should be explicit, and repeated - however often - wherever they occur. A large number of the methods, in fact almost all of the water analysis, assumes access to auto-analysers, and a significant amount of the soil carbon and nitrogen analysis is targeted at elemental analysers. Neither are likely to be available in many laboratories around the world, and I question whether they are truly necessary for those with moderate throughput, especially if the service agent is not just down the road. Similarly, some of the methods are written as if specific to one make and model of equipment, with little guidance about principles, or whether the method could be transferred to another machine. This is particularly true of the water analysis section. On that account, therefore, I already began to doubt if this book could be truly useful. Another oddity, in my view, is the unnecessary use of atomic absorption (or emission) where much simpler approaches are perfectly adequate, e.g. in the determination of gypsum, weighing of the precipitate gives an acceptable result (compare the potential errors in this with those of diluting a solution several hundredfold for AAS). Likewise I was somewhat astonished to read of sodium and potassium determinations in water by AAS-GTA - without any advice about biological contamination; you would have to stop breathing at this level of sensitivity. Other methods are idiosyncratic; e.g. why persist with the unreliable Walkley-Black method for soil organic carbon over one such as that of Kalembasa and Jenkinson (J. Sci. Fd Agric., 24: 1085-1090), which gives a far more reliable digestion temperature and better recovery; why determine soil carbonates by titration - what is wrong with a calcimeter (and what about the problem of magnesian carbonates); the uncritical mention of laser particle size analysers for soil analysis is likely to lead to some very expensive and pointless purchases - they do NOT perform adequately on the necessary range of soils compared with widely accepted standard methods. Chemicals can also be obscure. What is the wetting agent 'Brij-35' (page 38), and where does one get it; where do you get 'Superfloc' (page 49 and others) from; similarly, 'Aerosol-22' solution (page 168). Some of the science also seems a little careless. For example, are the authors seriously suggesting on page 7 that the pH value is moisture corrected; how does one weigh 0 mg to an accuracy of 1 mg (page 11); does citrate-dithionite reagent really dissolve gibbsite (page 45) - it never seemed to remove it from my X-ray diffraction traces; why worry about silica in the water (page 60) during P determination - what about the silica dissolved from the soils; Olsen-P is not phosphate - much of it is organically bound P; why use tap water in the laser analyser (page 290) if it causes flocculation; yet again we have reference to sieve mesh sizes (they are mesh apertures) of 5 0 / z m and 100/~m - they don't exist. The apertures are 53 /zm and 106/zm. I shall be accused of pedantry, but science is about precision and accuracy. And this brings me to the most unfortunate aspect of this book, which is, I am sorry to say, the English. The publishers have served the Editors very badly by not making sure that the text was checked by a native speaker. I hardly found a page, especially in the soil sections, free of errors of grammar and spelling, some rendering the text meaningless. This is a pity, because there is useful information, e.g. the sections on sulphur fractionation, water
BookReviews
253
sampling and preservation, reference waters, and sample preparation for XRF and XRD. I am sorry, but I cannot recommend this book in its present form, least of all to professional soil scientists. In my view, this edition should be withdrawn and re-written, with significant parts based on International Standards. It is arguable if such 'local' texts have a place at all in an increasingly internationalised world. They should certainly be questioned as teaching materials. P. Loveland Silsoe, UK
Pll s0341-8162(97)00024-6
Steepland Geomorphology. Olav Slaymaker (ed), John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, UK, 1995, ix + 283 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0-471-95752-6. This is the third volume in Wiley's International Association of Geomorphologists series and the second volume of contributions from the 3rd International Geomorphological Conference which was held at McMaster University, Ontario in August 1993. Its theme is centered on the landforms and processes of 'steeplands', that is, areas of high relief in which geomorphic processes are often highly active and, equally often, highly variable. The term 'steepland' achieved international use through a series of symposia on geomorphic processes in the lands around the Pacific Rim during the 1980s. This volume continues the tradition of those symposia but extends it to a truly global context and a more explicit recognition of geomorphic history and longer time scales than those of the present. Thus, Steepland Geomorphology includes considerations of landscape history and time scales that extend across 10 or 12 orders of magnitude. This broadening of the context of mountain geomorphology should be widely appreciated. Steepland Geomorphology consists of 14 chapters contributed by a total of 35 authors. The editor's Introduction sets the context for and draws broad links between the chapters which follow. These fall into four sections treating in turn: conceptual concerns; sediment inputs to steepland systems; sediment storage; and landform evolution. The first section of the book contains four chapters with a common theme of the varying sensitivities of geomorphic systems over widely disparate timescales. Gilchrist offers a treatment of landscape evolution in southern Africa which extends back to the late-Mesozoic and challenges the classic treatment of these landscapes by L.C. King. The length of this timescale contrasts with those of the three chapters which follow, all of which treat timescales more typical of recent work in geomorphology. In the first of these, Johnson describes the complex response of paraglacial processes in the alpine systems of the Yukon over millennia (the Holocene). The study of contemporary sediment production, storage and yield in the Harlach Valley, central Alps by Becht shrinks the timescale to that of a few years. Finally, the timescale is further shortened in the examination of responses to the eruption of Nevado de1 Ruiz (1985) by Thouret et al.