Session Introduction: Trends and Challenges in Manufactured, Blended, and Engineered Soils for Urban Applications.

This special session was developed to help understand the scope of the trend in manufactured, blended, and engineered soils in urban environments and identify gaps, challenges and novel opportunities for research and practice. In urbanized and developed lands, custom blended soils or soils engineered for a specific environmental function are increasingly common and are being used in applications from bioinfiltration swales for stormwater to greenroofs to systems for contaminant treatment. Blended and recycled soils are also being deployed in cities to support urban forests, turf, and ordinary landscapes. This trend bridges a wide range of disciplines as society increasingly designs ecological systems in urbanized areas and creates not only scientific challenges, but challenges in our collaborative structures. This introduction to the special session will describe the wide array of these special soils and offer an overview of selected pitfalls in their study and implementation. Examples from greeninfrastructure applications will be emphasized.