Comparing Soil Characteristics in Urban and Rural Landscapes.

Urban development has been shown to alter soil profile and soil quality that can influence soil functions such as, water movement and availability, aeration and the amount of nutrients released from soil organic matter (SOM) mineralization. Recently, due to the expanding growth of urban areas, a better understanding of the changes of soil characteristics resulting from urban versus rural management is important to determine. Therefore, the objective of this study was to identify the differences of soil properties collected from urban and rural areas in Kentucky. Soil samples collected from central and western Kentucky were analyzed for total porosity, macroporosity, compaction, water retention, organic matter, water stable aggregates and acidity level. Analysis of variance, Student t-test, Pearson Correlation analysis, and regressions were used to determine the significance among the treatments/fields and to identify the relationships between soil properties and the type of fields used in this study. The detail results and discussion from this research will be presented in the poster.

Keywords: Aeration, aggregates, rural soils, soil organic matter, urban soils