Anthropogenic Soils and Landscapes in the Mountain Zone of the Caucasus

The aim of the research was to establish the scale and intensity of anthropogenic transformation of soils in the Caucasus mountain zone in result of plowing and creation of agricultural terraces. Agricultural terraces are specific natural-anthropogenic soil-ground systems, which are the result of controlled anthropogenic destruction and gravitational movement of soil material and parent rock within individual sections of the slope. In this case, soil with a different set of genetic horizons and a different composition of the mineral part appears, different from the background soils that existed before plowing. For the first time, mapping of the areas of terrace fields in the mid-mountain zone on the territory of the northern and southern slopes of the Greater Caucasus was carried out. It was established that the total area of the terrace fields in the mid-mountain zone of the Greater Caucasus is 289 552 hectares, of which the largest part falls on the territory of the Russian Federation—272 070 hectares. Based on the results of studying soils of agricultural terraces in the mid-mountain region of the Karachaevo-Cherkesskaya Republic and the Republic of Dagestan, the influence of soil-forming rocks and slope exposure on soil properties is shown. The creation of areas with a horizontal surface and the inclusion of large volumes of soil-forming material into the arable layer caused a convergence of the properties of terrace soils. As a result, the content of Corg, pH values, and the content of mobile forms of phosphorus and potassium on slopes of different exposures became quite close.