LAUSR

Soils Within Cities: Global Approaches to Their Sustainable Management—Composition, Properties, and Functions of Soils of the Urban Environment T he book Soils within Cities, edited by M. J. Levin, K.-H. J. Kim, J. L. Morel, W. Burghardt, P. Charzyński, and R. K. Shaw, is a compendium of relatively short chapters with an introduction and history of the SUITMAWorking Group that was launched at the 16th World Congress of the International Union of Soil Science in 1998. Collectively, the book's authors come from the SUITMAWorking Group, and as a result the book reads more like proceedings for a SUITMA conference, which have been held biennially since 2000, than as an edited book. It is important to note that SUITMA is an acronym for Soils of Urban, Industrial, Traffic, Mining and Military areas, which makes this volume a more expansive view of urban soils than has typically been presented in earlier books published on the subject. In addition, an essential value of SUITMA (and this book) is that it encompasses an international perspective on urban soil research. The book is basically organized around three major topics: (1) characteristics, formation, classification, and survey (Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5); (2) management (Chapters 6 and 7); and (3) ecosystem services provided by urban soils (Chapters 8 and 9). Each topic has a number of relatively short subchapters that are loosely related to the overall chapter, but do not follow a common format or writing style. Therefore, on the one hand, the reader will have to get past the varying styles of writing, formatting, and so on, but on the other hand, there is a wealth of information and insight about urban soils with varying perspectives from around the world. I found the first and third major topics to be the most compelling and informative. There have been great strides in developing classification systems for urban soils and their survey andmapping, which is clearly a success story for urban soil science and its application. It would, however, behoove the discipline to put urban soils within the context of overall anthropogenic effects, such as with cultivation and other land uses. More also could have been made of the “novelty” of urban environments and the assemblages of species that occur in urban areas with respect to soil formation, biodiversity, and ecosystem processes, for instance, the notion that urban ecosystems are “emergent” and thus can serve as “natural experiments” to study soil responses to the effects of invasive plant and animal species or as analogs to assess the impacts of climate change on soil processes. In addition, from a practical standpoint, no mention is made of the interpretation of soil types or mapping units being described in urban landscapes. But these are only minor criticisms, given the relatively recent emergence of urban soil science and SUITMA in the previous two decades. This compendium of chapters represents the most thorough overview of urban soils yet found in a single volume, and I congratulate the editors for their efforts to publish this book. More specific comments of the three major topics follow. Chapter 2 is the longest of all the chapters in the total number of pages and is made up of several subchapters. Together these subchapters cover the characteristics, criteria, and functioning of urban soils. Accordingly, this chapter provides the bases for discussing SUITMA soils in the remainder of the book. Subchapter 2.2 in particular provides a nice overview of anthropogenic soil criteria, which again is mostly directed at urban soil conditions and not necessarily inclusive of other types of anthropogenic influences on soil characteristics, such as with cultivated soils. In particular, the authors make a good case for recognizing human-altered and human-transported materials to capture soil modifications in urban landscapes and how human-altered and human-transported materials can be recognized