About Pedosphere

Pedosphere

Pedosphere is an English-language, peer-reviewed international journal of soil science, founded in 1991 and published bimonthly in English by Elsevier and Science Press on behalf of the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Nanjing, Jiangsu. It publishes research on soil physics, chemistry, biology, fertility, remediation and land management, including work on China's red soils and paddy soils. Sponsored jointly by the Soil Science Society of China and the Institute of Soil Science, it is one of China's longest-running English-language journals in its field, and it is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus.

Founded in 1991 in Nanjing

Pedosphere was founded in 1991 and is published bimonthly in English, without a Chinese edition — the journal gives its ISSN as 1002-0160, with the Chinese national number CN 32-1315/P, and an online ISSN of 2210-5107. Its editorial office is at the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Nanjing. Publishing in English only, from the start, was a deliberate international orientation: the journal was created so that Chinese soil science could be read directly by researchers abroad, and so that soil scientists around the world would submit their own work to a Chinese-based title. More than three decades later it remains in the same city, with the same sponsoring institute, which gives it an institutional continuity many younger journals do not have.

Sponsors and cooperating institutions

The journal is sponsored jointly by the Soil Science Society of China, the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, in cooperation with five major Chinese institutions and universities working in soil science: China Agricultural University, the Institute of Applied Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural University, South China Agricultural University, and Zhejiang University. That sponsor-and-partner structure spreads the journal across China's main soil-science centres — north, northeast, east and south — rather than tying it to a single laboratory. The Editor-in-Chief named by the publisher is Professor Shen Ren-Fang, Honorary President of the Soil Science Society of China and Director of the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

What the title means: the soil layer of the Earth

The journal takes its name from the pedosphere itself — the Earth's soil layer, the zone where the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere meet and interact. It is a fitting name for a journal whose declared interests cross environmental science, ecology, agriculture, bioscience, geoscience and forestry. Soil is not studied in isolation in its pages: it is the medium through which water moves, in which plants root, in which carbon is stored and released, and on which farming and ecosystems depend. A journal named for the whole soil sphere signals that breadth, and its contents — from mineralogy to soil gases and global change — honour the name.

Core scope: physics, chemistry, biology and fertility

Pedosphere lists its areas of particular interest in detail. They include soil physics; soil chemistry; soil biology and biochemistry; soil fertility and plant nutrition; soil resources and use; and soil mineralogy. Soil physics deals with structure, water movement and the physical conditions roots and organisms experience. Soil chemistry covers the reactions that govern nutrient availability and pollutant behaviour. Soil biology and biochemistry address the organisms and enzymes that drive decomposition and nutrient cycling. Soil fertility and plant nutrition connect all of this to crop growth — the applied question of whether a soil can feed a crop, and what must be added when it cannot. Together these form the classical core of soil science, and the journal covers all of them.

Environment, conservation and problem soils

Beyond the classical core, the journal's stated interests include the soil environment and ecology; soil and water conservation; forest, range and wetland soils; soil salinity and management; soil and plant analysis and technology; and soil gases and global change. This second half of the scope is about soils under pressure: erosion that carries soil and water away, salinity that renders land unproductive unless it is managed, wetlands and forests whose soils store carbon and support distinct ecosystems, and the exchange of gases between soil and atmosphere that links soil management to climate. Remediation and land management, highlighted in this directory's description, belong here too — research on contaminated or degraded soils and on how their function can be restored or protected.

Red soils, paddy soils and Chinese soil landscapes

This directory notes the journal's work on China's red soils and paddy soils, two defining soil landscapes of the country. Red soils dominate large areas of subtropical southern China, where they support grain and other crop production but present well-studied problems of acidity, nutrient deficiency and erosion that long-term fertilisation and management experiments continue to investigate. Paddy soils, shaped by centuries of flooded rice cultivation, are anthropogenic soils whose formation is driven by irrigation, puddling, drainage and manuring, and whose behaviour — including nutrient cycling and trace-element behaviour under alternating flooded and drained conditions — is a research field in itself. A Nanjing-based journal, in a region of both landscapes, is naturally placed to publish this work, and Chinese soil research of this kind is a substantial part of what international readers come to Pedosphere to find.

Article types and international authorship

The journal publishes mainly original research articles, together with some reviews, mini-reviews, short communications and special issues. It welcomes submissions from scientists around the world on timely, high-quality original research, especially up-to-date achievements and advances across the whole field of soil science. That welcome is reflected in its editorial recognition abroad as well as at home: in 2018, for example, Professor James M. Tiedje of Michigan State University — a distinguished professor of microbiology and of plant, soil and microbial sciences — was appointed an Honorary Editor-in-Chief of the journal, a sign of the international standing the title had built in soil microbiology and related areas since 1991.

Indexing and abstracting

Pedosphere has been abstracted and indexed in most of the internationally important databases relevant to its field, as its publisher lists them: Current Contents (Agriculture, Biology and Environmental Sciences), the Science Citation Index Expanded, Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS, CAB Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, Scopus and ScienceDirect, among many others including GEOBASE and a long list of agricultural, forestry, water-resources and environmental abstracting services, as well as Chinese services such as CSCD and CNKI. For a soil journal this breadth matters, because its readers are scattered across agriculture, ecology, geology and environmental science, each with its own abstracting tradition; being present in all of them keeps the journal visible to the whole of its potential audience.

The Nanjing soil-science base

The Institute of Soil Science in Nanjing, the journal's home, is one of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' central institutes for the discipline, and the institute itself presents Pedosphere first among its journals. Nanjing also hosts Nanjing Agricultural University, one of the cooperating institutions, making the city a genuine soil-science cluster: the journal's editorial office, a national academy institute, a state key laboratory among its sponsors, and a major agricultural university all operate there. This directory lists the journal from Nanjing, Jiangsu, and that location is not incidental — editorial proximity to active laboratories working on the red soils, paddy soils and intensive agricultural soils of eastern and southern China shapes the manuscripts the journal sees first and knows best.

Place in soil-science publishing

Soil science has a small number of long-established international journals, and Pedosphere is China's representative among them: English-only since 1991, bimonthly, published by Elsevier and Science Press, sponsored by the national soil-science society and the Chinese Academy of Sciences' soil institute, and indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus. Its declared scope — from soil physics, chemistry and mineralogy through fertility and plant nutrition to conservation, salinity, remediation, soil gases and global change — covers the discipline whole. For researchers outside China it is a primary route into Chinese soil research; for Chinese researchers it has been, for more than thirty years, a home journal with an international readership.