User:Paleorthid/George Demas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 George P. Demas in the field. |
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| Born | 28 April 1958 |
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| Died | 23 December 1999 Snow Hill, Maryland |
| Residence | USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Pedology (soil study) |
| Institution | USDA NAtural Resources Conservation Service |
| Alma mater | University of Maryland |
| Known for | Subaqueous Soils in the USA |
George P. Demas, Ph.D. NRCS – Soil Survey Project Leader, Pioneer in Subaqueous Soils USDA - Secretary’s Honor Award for Scientific Research, SSSA - Emil Truog Award for outstanding contribution to Soil Science through the Ph.D. thesis.
George Demas conceived the fundamental concept of subaqueous soils in the early 1990's when he published an “idea” paper in Soil Survey Horizons, and he continued to pursue it even while concerns about its legitimacy were expressed by other soil scientists. The potential value of George’s ideas, however, were recognized by the Natural Resources Conservation Service when they awarded him support and academic leave under the USDA-NRCS Graduate Studies Program so that he could pursue his Ph.D. in pedology. George convincingly demonstrated that additions, losses, translocations and transformations occur within subaqueous sediment profiles, causing the formation of pedogenic soil horizons, and leading to the conclusion that these sediments are better understood to be subaqueous soils. Consequently, NRCS modified the definition of soil, as stated in Soil Taxonomy, to include subaqueous soils in shallow water environments. George developed a protocol for producing detailed bathymetric maps by joining GPS data and fathometer soundings which were normalized to mean sea level. This enabled subaqueous terrain analysis and the identification of a number of subaqueous landscape units that contained distinct suites of soils associated with those landscapes. This validated that the soil-landscape paradigm could be applied in a subaqueous environment.
George, however, was not content for this work to remain principally scholastic. Through his collaboration with estuarine ecologists working on submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV) , they were able to demonstrate that the growth and survival of SAV were correlated to particular subaqueous soils, which constituted the first interpretive use of a subaqueous soil survey. In demonstrating the applicability of the pedological paradigm to shallow water estuarine environments, George Demas effectively pushed soil science across a new frontier, and has thrust the principles of pedology into an entirely new realm.
Following the completion of his doctoral studies, George continued his work with the USDA-NRCS and had been named Project Leader responsible for management and oversight of the soil survey update for the State of Delaware and for subaqueous soil mapping projects in the Mid-Atlantic Region.
George passed away suddenly and unexpectedly at his home on December 23, 1999 after a sudden bout with pneumonia.
[edit] References
Demas, G. P. 1993. Submerged soils: a new frontier in soil survey. Soil Survey Horizons 34: 44-46.
Demas, G. P., M. C. Rabenhorst, and J. C. Stevenson. 1996. Subaqueous Soils: A pedological approach to the study of shallow water habitats. Estuaries 19: 229-237.
Demas, G. P., and M. C. Rabenhorst. 1998. Subaqueous soils: a resource inventory protocol. Proceedings of the 16th World Congress on Soil Science, Montpellier, France. August 20-26,1998. Sym #17, on CD.
Demas, G. P., and M. C. Rabenhorst. 1999. Subaqueous soils: pedogenesis in a submersed environment. Soil Sci. Soc. Am J. 63: 1250-1257.
Demas, G. P., and M. C. Rabenhorst. 2001. Factors of Subaqueous Soil Formation: a System of Quantitative Pedology for Submersed Environments. Geoderma. 102:189-204
