Interdepartmental Research Center on the "Earth Critical Zone" for
Landscape and Agro-environment Management Support
CRISP hosts an extraordinary collection of thin sections of soil for microscopic observations.
This is a collection of over 2550 thin sections of soils representative of over 40 nations around the world donated by prof. E.A. Fitzpatrick to Prof. Fabio Terribile, his former student and now director of the newly founded CRISP Research Center.
The collection is the testimony and legacy of the brilliant research activity of the prof. E. A. FitzPatrick; one of the founding fathers of soil micromorphology. In his long and frenetic activity as a professor at the Department of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Aberdeen (UK), he traveled continuously to many parts of the world
building an enormous and very interesting collection of soils from which the thin sections in question were then obtained. The thin sections refer to soils of particular importance in Alaska, Australia, Belgium, Belize, Borneo, Brazil, Canada, China, Malaysia, England, France, Gambia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malawi, Malaysia, Holland, New Guinea, Nigeria, Pakistan, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Serbia, Spain, Sudan, Svalbard, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, USA, Wales, Zambia.
The CRISP, with the support of the Federiciano University and the Library of the University of Aberdeen, is about to launch a project with the aim of contributing to the creation – at the CRISP – of a soil microscopy laboratory – open to international soil researchers – in which it is possible to observe and analyze the very rich collection of the world’s soils seen under the microscope, integrated by the study of digital data and documents (around 40 doctoral and master’s theses) of which the collection will be accompanied.