Abstract
The Geescroft Wilderness at Rothamsted, UK, is one of two areas of land previously in arable cropping that were fenced off in the 1880s and allowed to run wild. The other, much smaller, area had been part of the Broadbalk Continuous Wheat experiment (Jenkinson, 1971). Lawes (1895) was interested in what plants would become established after abandoning arable cropping and what changes might occur in the soil. After 110 years, Geescroft is now a deciduous woodland and, although it is not an experiment in the conventional sense, we can use the site to follow changes in soil organic matter under undisturbed conditions.
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References
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Poulton, P.R. (1996). Geescroft Wilderness, 1883–1995. In: Powlson, D.S., Smith, P., Smith, J.U. (eds) Evaluation of Soil Organic Matter Models. NATO ASI Series, vol 38. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61094-3_36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61094-3_36
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