Envirothon is an environmental science competition. You go and learn about topics such as soils, aquatics, forestry, wildlife, and current environmental issues, and then you compete with other teams to see who knows the most. The topic I studied was soils. There are thousands of different classifications of soils. Some are better for certain uses than others. My section also focused on how growing crops can affect the soil.
Soils naturally have many minerals and microbes in them. When you grow one plant to often, you deplete the soil of some of those nutrients. Fertilizer then becomes necessary, which in turn causes water pollution. It also talked a lot about different types of deposits. For example there are alluvial deposits, which are put there by streams, colluvial deposits, which are moved by gravity, eolian deposits which are moved by wind, and lacustrine deposits which are left behind by lakes. This is only a small part of the 88 page document that I had to study for this. I had no idea that soils were so complex, but apparently they are.
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