Soils as a Record of the Past

On the occasion of the EGU General Assembly 2012, researchers and students involved in interdisciplinary soil science studies were invited to submit abstracts to the session SSS10.2. Soils as a Record of the Past. This session, convened by Claudio Zaccone (Univ. of Foggia) and co-convened by Jan M. van Mourik (Univ. of Amsterdam), Carlo Barbante (Univ. of Venice) and Sjoerd J. Kluiving (Univ. of Amsterdam) (http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2012/session/9994), received numerous contributions regarding, only to mention some of the main topics, the application of new techniques to obtain palaeoecological and geoarchaeological information from different soil types, the application of different age-dating techniques to have reliable geochronological information, new reconstructions of vegetation and climate of the past through the integrated analysis of different terrestrial archives, the reconstructions of the human impact on the environment, in terms of organic and inorganic pollutant, land-use, fires, etc, and the reconstruction of soil forming environments of the past and the landscape evolution. In the present Special Issue, we present a selection of papers (8) in order to share the potential of soils as a record of the past with the community of geosciences.