Skip to main content

Museum to showcase soil diversity in Kerala

Kerala’s first soil museum, to be inaugurated here on January 1, will highlight the diversity of soil and mineral resources in the State and provide critical data inputs for farmers, helping them improve crop yield.
The museum, set up by the Department of Soil Survey and Conservation at Parottukonam, also offers a platform to create awareness of the need for soil conservation and watershed development. It has academic support facilities for students and researchers in soil science.
Soil profiles
The main attraction of the museum is a collection of soil profiles featuring the different benchmark soils in each district. Named monolith, a profile represents the soil typical of a region, with all the basic characteristics preserved intact. “We have prepared monoliths of all the 82 soil series found in the State. The information provided by these profiles is of special significance to students, researchers, and farmers alike and of general interest to the public,” says P.N.Premachandran, Director, Soil Survey and Conservation.

Each monolith is a 1.5-metre vertical section of soil. The samples are dug out without disturbing the elements and transported to the department’s laboratory where it is processed up to a month before being mounted in the museum hall. “The soil structure has to be meticulously maintained during collection, transporting, and processing. It is a long, painstaking process,” explains Dr. Premachandran. The project team was trained by experts from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, which hosts the World Soil Museum.
The classification of soils has been done in accordance with the internationally accepted USDA (US Department of Agriculture) system. Each soil profile is accompanied by information on the taxonomic class, nutrient status, productivity potential, and an interpretation showing the suitability for various crops, optimum land use and managerial requirements. While students and researchers can use the data for assignments and project work, farmers will find it useful in nutrient management and crop planning. Visitors will be provided a printed handout on each series.
The eight general types of soil found in Kerala, namely alluvial, coastal alluvial, kari, red loam, black cotton, forest, laterite and hill, are also exhibited, along with a map made of these soil types. Another section of the museum is devoted to a collection of rocks and minerals and an exhibition of various soil constituents like clay, silt, sand, stone and gravel. A geological and mineral map of Kerala is another highlight. Display boards explain the principles of soil formation and the relevance of soil to climate change and food security. The building has a mini- theatre for presentations and documentary films.
A Soil Information Centre attached to the museum features a watershed model to demonstrate the various elements of a watershed and conservation measures like contour bund, slope inward terrace, earthen bund, live fencing, drainage channels, grade bund and various types of check dams and rainwater harvesting mechanisms. District soil maps and watershed maps and an exhibition of soil survey tools are another feature. The information centre has a reference section equipped with books published by the department.
Chief Minister Oommen Chandy is scheduled to inaugurate the museum on Wednesday in the presence of Minister for Agriculture K.P. Mohanan.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

High dose of Vitamin C and B3 can kill colon cancer cells: study (downtoearth)

In a first, a team of researchers has found that high doses of Vitamin C and niacin or Vitamin B3 can kill cancer stem cells. A study published in Cell Biology International showed the opposing effects of low and high dose of vitamin C and vitamin B3 on colon cancer stem cells. Led by Bipasha Bose and Sudheer Shenoy, the team found that while low doses (5-25 micromolar) of Vitamin C and B3 proliferate colon cancer stem cells, high doses (100 to 1,000 micromolar) killed cancer stem cells. Such high doses of vitamins can only be achieved through intravenous injections in colon cancer patients. The third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, colon cancer can be prevented by an intake of dietary fibre and lifestyle changes. While the next step of the researchers is to delineate the mechanisms involved in such opposing effects, they also hope to establish a therapeutic dose of Vitamin C and B3 for colon cancer stem cell therapy. “If the therapeutic dose gets validated under in vivo...
2 comments
Click Here To Read more »

"ISRO has capabilities to build geostationary satellites for air quality monitoring” (downtoearth)

Pawan Gupta's findings on trans-boundary movement of pollution (Punjab to Delhi) from biomass burning in 2015 spurred debates. He participated in discussions with Indian regulators early September at the Better Air Quality Conference in Busan on the advantages of using satellite data for air quality monitoring. He explains to Down to Earth how air quality monitoring is done using satellite data. How is satellite data used to measure air pollution? Satellites that provide information on atmospheric pollutants are normally (not always) in the low earth orbits (400-1000 km above the Earth’s surface). A single satellite can carry one or more remote sensing instruments onboard that look down to earth and obtain information about the object in the field of view of satellite sensor. The Earth receives electromagnetic radiation from the sun, which travels through space and reaches the earth-atmosphere system. The radiation then interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface...
1 comment
Click Here To Read more »