Chemical weathering in soils from the glacial Lake Agassiz region of Manitoba, Canada

Recently, there has been considerable interest in categorizing the availability of plant essential nutrients and selected transition metals in the soil environment so as to predict their effects on ecosystem health and the efficacy of potential management practices. Researchers desire to isolate important soil properties, determinant biotic activities and fundamental pedogenic processes that control biogeochemical cycling and are potentially modifiable for the goal of ecosystem sustainability. In a relative sense, a significant portion of this scientific effort has been directed towards temperate and tropical forest ecosystems, with relatively less attention given towards understanding the boreal forest ecosystem. Consequently, an investigation was undertaken near Thompson, Manitoba, to: (1) determine the extent of weathering of the principal soils, (2) employ a selective-sequential chemical extraction method to categorize the soil-chemical fractions responsible for nutrient availability, and (3) infer the importance of selected soil forming processes responsible for soil genesis and nutrient availability. Preliminary findings suggest that nutrient availability is related to the nutrient concentration in the cation exchange fraction and/or to nutrients sequestered by the organic fraction. The metals in the manganese, noncrystalline and crystalline iron oxide fractions may be bound so tightly to these oxides that they are largely unavailable to plants; however, they are largely responsible for buffering the more labile pools against gradually changing vegetational and climatic conditions.