Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
W.P.Adderleyet al.
ModellingTraditional Manuring Practices
3.9
Modelling Traditional
Manuring Practices in the
North Atlantic Context: Soil
Sustainability of a Shetland
Island Community?
W.P. A DDERLEY 1 , I.A. S IMPSON 1 , M.J. L OCKHEART 2 ,
R.P. E VERSHED 2
AND D.A. D AVIDSON 1
1
Department of Environmental Science, University of Stirling,
Stirling FK9 4LA; and 2 Organic Geochemistry Unit, School of
Chemistry,Cantock'sClose, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TS,
UK
Introduction
There is increasing interest in the application of soil science to questions of
past land management, and sustainability of early agricultural communi-
ties. Modelling has the potential to create hypotheses linking land manage-
ment and soil properties over extended historical periods. Soil properties,
however, have yet to be modelled from historical and ethnographic data
and tested against present-day measurements. If soil models are demon-
strated to be accurate predictors of soil properties in historic contexts then
this will allow questions of historical sustainability to be addressed. The
island of Papa Stour, Shetland, can be examined as a site where long-term
use of traditional manuring practices has been abandoned only relatively
recently. These traditional practices were replaced by uniform extensive
sheep grazing across the whole island. Without the burden of interference
from modern agricultural practices, the island is a unique 'laboratory' with
detailed ethnographic and historical information on early land management
and a legacy of relict plaggen soils known to contain detailed evidence of
such (Davidson and Carter, 1998; Simpson et al ., 1999). In this chapter, we
seek to use the ethnographic and land management information to predict
plaggen soil organic carbon levels using the CENTURY soil turnover
model (Parton et al ., 1987) and test the predictive performance of the
model against present-day soil organic carbon levels. The model is then
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