| Abstract: | The study of soil weathering processes College of Resources and Environment, rates and the associated influencing factors is crucial for understanding of the feedbacks between soil and environment, which will provide a basis for predicting soil behavior and evolution trend in the ecosystem under natural and anthropogenic forcings. This is also important for the effective management of soil resources. This article reviewed the methods for measuring soil weathering rates (including simulating leaching experiment, model calculation, isotope technique, element depletion and geochemical mass balance) and the influencing factors (including climate, organism, parent material, relief, time and human activities). In view of the serious degradation of soil resources, we proposed the challenge and opportunity of the research of soil weathering. The future study should focus on the critical processes, rates and the associated environmental thresholds of soil weathering under varying natural conditions and intensive human perturbations, including the establishment of the quantitative relationship between the weathering rates calculated by different methods, the analysis and interpretation of synergistic effects among multiple influencing factors, and the modeling and prediction of changing tendency of weathering rates under the impacts of both climatic changes and human activities, in order to guide the sustainable management of soil resource and mitigation of global change. |
