A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
edaphic
Edaphic means having to do with the soil. Ecologists use it to separate the influence of the ground from the influence of the weather: a plant community controlled by climate is a climatic one, and a community controlled by what it is rooted in is edaphic. An edaphic grassland persists in a wooded region because the soil there will not carry trees, regardless of rainfall.
Etymology
The word is Greek for the floor or the ground, the surface underfoot, and it came into English through nineteenth-century soil science. English has plenty of words for dirt but no adjective that means of the soil without also meaning dirty, so the borrowing filled a real gap. Soil itself has an oddly unglamorous history, coming through French from a Latin word for a seat or a floor.
Notes
The clearest edaphic effects come from rock that produces a chemically difficult soil. Serpentine ground is low in the nutrients plants need and high in metals they do not want, so serpentine areas carry their own flora, full of species found nowhere else, standing out as open scrub in the middle of forest. Chalk, gypsum, and salt flats each do the same thing in their own way.