engleski

Review of the properties of soil-forming factors in continental Croatia and their impact on soil suitability for agriculture

Soil properties are generally considered to vary with the five soil-forming factors: parent material, climate, organisms, time, and topography. Accordingly, the suitability of soils for agriculture depends primarily on the interplay of these factors. Therefore, the goal of this review was to highlight the main features of the soil-forming factors and to assess their influence on the suitability of soils in continental Croatia, as the most important agricultural region in the country. Our research outlined the basic properties of the five soil-forming factors across continental Croatia and showed how they affect the suitability of soils for agriculture. We found that, generally, soil suitability increases from the west to the east of the area. This appears to be mainly due to the precipitation gradient and the relief dynamics. These two factors were crucial also for the distribution and the properties of unconsolidated sedimentary parent materials across the area, thus affecting the soil suitability even more severely. Consequently, we recognized climate, relief, and parent material as the soil-forming factors with major impacts on agricultural suitability of soils in continental Croatia.

Soil-forming factors, Continental Croatia, Soil suitability, Pannonian region, Holocene parent materials

nije evidentirano