Garden with Insight v1.0 Help: soil layer

A soil layer is a section of the vertical soil profile delineated (by thickness) from other sections of the profile arbitrarily for the purposes of simulation. There are recognizable layers, called horizons, in most soils (some are the A, E and B horizons), but simulated soil layers correspond only roughly to these.

In this simulation the first layer is always 10 millimeters deep, because the very surface of the soil generally has a different microclimate than the rest of the soil profile. The other layers are larger or smaller depending on decisions made by researchers gathering soil data. Generally the researchers tried to make the layers closest to the soil surface the least thick since much of the interactions important for plant growth occur closer to the soil surface. There are always ten soil layers in this simulation (EPIC allows a smaller number but we fixed it at ten).