Published Resources Details
Book
- Title
- A history of the CSIRO Division of Soils: 1927- 1997
- Secondary Title
- Technical Report 43/98
- Imprint
- CSIRO Land and Water, Adelaide, November 1998, 58 pdf pp
- Url
- http://hdl.handle.net/102.100.100/215556?index=1
- Description
Rights Statement:
This report has been placed on the CSIRO repository and may be made available to persons outside of CSIRO for non commercial purposes, in its entirety and without deletion of disclaimers and copyright information.- Abstract
On 31 January 1997, after 70 years of scientific achievement and service to Australia's primary industries, the CSIRO's Division of Soils ceased to exist, when it became a part of the large new Division, CSIRO Land and Water. The new Division comprises the former Division of Water Resources and the Centre for Environmental Mechanics, together with the former Division of Soils. There are many who will regret the passing of the Division of Soils, but constant change is in the nature of scientific institutions, as of science, and the new Division opens up new possibilities for research and its application to Australian primary industries and to the better understanding of the Australian environment.
. . .
The earliest report of soil investigations in Australia was published in 1845 in Strzelecki's Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. It included detailed descriptions of 41 soils from New South Wales and Tasmania, with the stated aim of 'contributing some fresh data to the
important question relating to the causes of the fertility or sterility of soils in general'. Later in the nineteenth century, masses of analytical data, based principally on samples submitted by farmers to Departments of Agriculture, were published in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.Regional soil surveys in Australia were first undertaken by Jensen, leading to the publication in 1914 of his book The Soils of New South Wales, which included a generalised soil map. The surveys, and others that followed, were based largely on surface soil characteristics and on the analysis of 'average' samples, although Guthrie, in 1906, described four classes of soils in the area now known as the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, in which he referred to subsoils.
Little attention was given in Australia to techniques of soil survey that had been established in other countries during the early years of the twentieth century, until a summary of soil classification methods was published by Prescott, in 1926. Prescott set out for Australian soil workers, in an ordered way, the four bases used at that time for soil classification: the geological, as used in Britain; the climatic, or zonal, developed by the Russians; the ecological, as practised by Australian land surveyors; and the physical, as developed by the U.S. Soil Survey. The stage was now set for the development of modern soil science in Australia. [Source: Introduction, page 3]
Related entries
Corporate Bodies
- CSIR/O Division of Soils, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (1929 - 1997)
- CSIRO Division of Land Research, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (1965 - 1973)
- CSIRO Land Research and Regional Survey Section, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (1950 - 1957)
- Waite Agricultural Research Institute, The University of Adelaide (1924 - 1991)