Mapping soil knowledge: A qualitative comparison of laypeople’s understanding of soil and expert-identified essentials in Germany

IF 2.5 3区环境科学与生态学 Q2 BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION

Journal for Nature Conservation Pub Date : 2025-09-03 DOI:10.1016/j.jnc.2025.127079

Johanna Schaal, Nicolas Neef, Siegmar Otto

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Soils play a critical role in mitigating climate change, conserving biodiversity, and supporting human well-being. To ensure a sustainable future for soil, raising the publićs awareness of soil conservation and enhancing their knowledge is crucial. This qualitative study captures and represents laypeople’s soil knowledge through concept maps. These concept maps, along with the associated knowledge, were gathered through semi-structured interviews based on the approach of didactic reconstruction and are compared with expert-identified essentials for laypeople. These Laypeople demonstrate basic knowledge of certain aspects, such as the decomposition process, organisms and plant interactions with soil, and human impacts on degradation. However, notable gaps exist in soil genesis, its role in climate protection, and perception of soil texture, types, and processes, including misconceptions about erosion. This study underscores the importance of education and awareness-building in soil conservation efforts. The concept maps generated in this study can serve as a basis for this purpose.

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测绘土壤知识：外行人对土壤的理解和专家鉴定的德国要领的定性比较

土壤在减缓气候变化、保护生物多样性和支持人类福祉方面发挥着关键作用。为了确保土壤的可持续未来，提高publićs对土壤保持的认识并增强他们的知识至关重要。这种定性研究通过概念图捕获并表示外行人的土壤知识。这些概念图以及相关知识是通过基于教学重建方法的半结构化访谈收集的，并与专家为外行人确定的要点进行比较。这些外行人展示了某些方面的基本知识，如分解过程，生物和植物与土壤的相互作用，以及人类对退化的影响。然而，在土壤成因、其在气候保护中的作用以及对土壤质地、类型和过程的认识（包括对侵蚀的误解）方面存在明显的差距。这项研究强调了教育和意识建设在土壤保持工作中的重要性。本研究产生的概念图可以作为这一目的的基础。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal for Nature Conservation 环境科学-生态学

CiteScore

3.70

自引率

5.00%

发文量

151

审稿时长

7.9 weeks

期刊介绍： The Journal for Nature Conservation addresses concepts, methods and techniques for nature conservation. This international and interdisciplinary journal encourages collaboration between scientists and practitioners, including the integration of biodiversity issues with social and economic concepts. Therefore, conceptual, technical and methodological papers, as well as reviews, research papers, and short communications are welcomed from a wide range of disciplines, including theoretical ecology, landscape ecology, restoration ecology, ecological modelling, and others, provided that there is a clear connection and immediate relevance to nature conservation. Manuscripts without any immediate conservation context, such as inventories, distribution modelling, genetic studies, animal behaviour, plant physiology, will not be considered for this journal; though such data may be useful for conservationists and managers in the future, this is outside of the current scope of the journal.