- Industry: Biology
- Number of terms: 15386
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
Terrapsychology is a word coined by Craig Chalquist to describe deep, systematic, trans-empirical approaches to encountering the presence, soul, or "voice" of places and things: what the ancients knew as their resident genius loci or indwelling spirit. This perspective emerged from sustained ...
A hardened soil layer that blocks plant root growth. Caused by clay compation, iron precipitation, or cementing by calcium carbonate precipitates. Growing plants like dandelions can loosen it up.
Industry:Biology
A depression or hole opened by sand or soil erosion caused by poor drainage. Common after a lot of rain, especially in heavily paved areas. Also: a place where unrecycled compounds accumulate.
Industry:Biology
The even distribution of individuals of a species. Of two groups of plants, roughly 50 individuals in each group is fairly even; 2 in one group and 50 in the other would be uneven. See Richness.
Industry:Biology
A salt or ester (acid-alcohol product) of nitric acid; in soil, used by plants for building amino acids and proteins. Artificially manufactured nitrates are used in fertilizers and explosives.
Industry:Biology
Costly, highly centralized, mechanical technology that uses a lot of energy, wastes resources, and pollutes the environment. Mining and agricultural machinery, for example. See Soft Technology.
Industry:Biology
Lewis Mumford's term for a mechanical sequestering of human energy into rigid social hierarchies. His examples include the labor force that built the Pyramids and the armies of both World Wars.
Industry:Biology
An underground layer of sand or rock that contains usable water. Can be unconfined (down to the first impervious rock layer) or confined (between the first and the second layers). See Artesian.
Industry:Biology
An approach developed by Wes Jackson and the The Land Institute that emphasizes mimicking natural ecosystems by growing perennial polycultures or mixtures of perennial grains, as prairies do.
Industry:Biology
Grasses cultivated for their edible seeds (grains). They include wheat, rice, maize, barley, oats, and rye. Around the world, they are grown more often and more abundantly than any other crop.
Industry:Biology
Mutualistic association of a fungus with plant roots. The fungus is nourished and housed by the roots it transports soil nutrients into. Almost nothing green would grow without this symbiosis.
Industry:Biology
