Alicia Hans

If you see this, quote post with flowers from your gallery. 🌱🌿 #nativeplants

Birdbill dayflower, Sacramento Mountains, southeastern New Mexico.

So it turns out that “pressing it into people’s hands” meant this book was one of my Christmas presents 😅. This is now the first book I read in 2025, and I really enjoyed it! Learned something new in every chapter and very well-written. Highly recommend! @bengoldfarb.bsky.social

#soilscience 🧪

A table runner knitted from a medium blue-teal yarn. The runner is made up of smaller squares, which form four open squares in the middle of the runner. The squares are laid out in a checkerboard pattern, with the stitching alternating between vertical and horizontal.

The first knitting project I’ve ever finished was also probably the best holiday gift I gave this year - a table runner that I sent to my aunt and uncle 😊

Wind chill Tuesday morning... COLD.

Oof 🥶🥶

#soilscience 🧪

I first got a brief intro to soil taxonomy when I took Principles of Soil Science in undergrad. I was confused and intimidated by it, and thought I’d never like it or be interested in it. After the field course, I love it, and now I use it in my job all the time!

Alicia posing in front of a paleo-Oxisol, a soil that formed when this part of California was in a tropical climate 40 million years ago. The soil is bright red and white, and Alicia is holding a chunk of the white kaolinite clay. Shrubs grow on top of the soil, many of them endemic due to aluminum toxicity issues in Oxisols.

Happy World Soil Day!

Soil scientists, reply in the comments - what’s a course you took or a book or article you read that significantly influenced your soil science career? For me, it’s definitely the soils field course I took in undergrad, because I realized I love doing soil taxonomy!

A soil profile laid out from top to bottom on a blue tarp, with blades of grass dividing the horizons. The soil starts off brown and then becomes gray due to gleying, then becomes reddish brown again at the bottom, indicating a perched water table. The clay content increases, then decreases, and then sharply increases again with depth, indicating two separate deposition events that formed this soil profile.

I had the opportunity to go to North Carolina in September for the NRCS’s Basic Soil Survey training. While traversing the floodplain of an area we were practicing mapping, my team found this soil. Between the lithologic discontinuity and the gleying, none of us had ever seen anything like it. #soil

Saw this on my computer earlier today and was incredibly confused. LOL.

#soilscience

I've missed this until now: an excellent review of 100s of studies of no-till/conventional crop yields and soil OM comparisons across Canada. Partial summary at canadianagronomist.ca/wp-content/u...
Full paper at
cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/...

I think the tide is starting to turn. Practical tips on conserving fungi might help, e.g. planting native plants, leaving leaf cover on the ground, reducing the use of chemical fertilizers, etc. Community workshops could be a good way to discuss and implement best practices and share results.

I’ve stained plant roots for AMF before, and from what I understand, the acidic glycerol-trypan blue method is necessary for thick, woody roots. For thinner, less woody roots, the ink and vinegar method works fine. Not sure about EMF.

Awesome picture! What kind of plant roots are you looking at?

We think these factors together are what led to these skid trails being so visible after almost 100 years! The logging definitely had a long-term impact on soil quality. It was definitely one of the coolest things I’ve ever done and something that makes me really glad I’m a soil scientist 😊 /End

And of course the steep slopes contributed to the erosion too. And then, because of the loss of soil, there was likely a loss of nutrient capacity from the soil, making it harder for the plants to return on the skid trails, perpetuating the lack of cover and furthering erosion. 10/

We also found some soil lines on rocks (which I didn’t get pictures of 😭) and soil accumulation behind logs, stumps, shrubs, and rocks on the skid trails. So our best guess about what happened was erosion due to a lack of ground cover and plant roots to hold the soil in place on the skid trails. 9/

The other was the rock fragments at the surface on the skid trail. When we dug a soil pit in the surrounding forest, those same rock fragments were 10 to 15 or even 20 cm below the soil surface. 8/

A couple things jumped out at us immediately when we took our data. The first was the steepness of the hillsides that these skid trails were on. They were on slopes of 60-70%. Generally, it’s not recommended to log slopes over 40%. 7/

A conifer forest, with branches and other leaf litter scattered on the forest floor, and no rocks visible at the surface.

We took data both on the skid trail and the forest between the skid trails (picture of the surrounding forest below). 6/

A skid trail that shows a linear gap in the tree canopy going down the slope, with rocks on the surface and only small shrubs growing on the skid trail.

This is what the skid trails looked like on the ground. 5/

Typically, after about 50-70 years, skid trails are indistinguishable from the surrounding forest. So we were asking ourselves, why are these skid trails still so visible after about 100 years? So we went out to investigate…4/

One of our other colleagues sent us a document that showed that from 1900 until about 1942, there was railroad logging done in the area. These lines are the skid trails from that logging. 3/

A screenshot from Google Maps showing a forested area with straight lines of no trees

Earlier this year, one of my colleagues was looking at various layers for the area, and noticed these very linear areas where the canopy was significantly shorter than the surrounding forests. These areas are even visible on satellite imagery on Google Maps! 2/

I think it’s time for me to start posting on here again 😅 so here’s a thread about one of the most interesting things I got to do this past field season at work: looking at the effects of legacy timber harvest in the Sacramento Mountains in southeastern New Mexico. 1/

View of White Sands from the Sacramento Mountains of southeastern New Mexico, with conifers and shrubs in the foreground

The same vista but at sunset, with the conifers in silhouette and White Sands no longer visible, and orange and yellow reflecting off the thin clouds in the sky

Two views of the same area: the Haynes Canyon Vista in the Sacramento Mountains of southeastern New Mexico. One taken during the day with White Sands visible, the other at sunset.

A really good book on this topic that I highly recommend is Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen. Published in 2012, but he basically predicted covid. I read part of it for a class in 2019 & the rest in the early pandemic days. It was fascinating.

There’s a soil science feed you can follow: bsky.app/profile/did:...