The “extra pinch” of pseudosand to enhance tropical biogeochemical processes understanding

Abstract

Despite knowing better, water-stable aggregates like pseudosands are still disintegrated into their clay- and silt-sized bits and pieces to serve standardization in texture determination. Lacking yet a viable alternative, this deliberately committed mistake seems the contemporary best practice for modeling purposes, which is far from being ideal. Here, we propose this misconception to be a major cause for flawed process understanding of tropical soils, leading to substantial uncertainties in model development. There is enough evidence as to why pseudosands are neither sand nor the plain sum of their clay- and silt-sized units and should therefore better be defined as an additional soil texture class for which properties have yet to be examined across the tropics.