I have just discovered the best thing EVER on soil and it is completely free. You too can have a copy of the FAO's State of Knowledge of Soil Biodiversity! It's got fabulous pictures in it and great facts. One gram of soil, 200m of fungal hyphae, several thousand of different taxa, a billion bacterial cells. And how bacteria are the very foundation of the food web.
FAO also have a downloadable soil classification guide as well as booklets on the potential or carbon sequestration on grasslands and other publications. This one looks really useful - it's a guide to visually identifying soils.
They also have a special section of their website dedicated to soil.
Here is another good soil site and this one has INCREDIBLE photos of soil mesofauna - like springtails and mites. The blogger is a photographer who has traveled the world to photograph them. And they are amazing, strange, colourful and beautiful. Seriously - check this out.... NOW!!!! Truly, these little creatures are as cool as tropical fish or rainforest birds.
There's a Volunteer Officer who is taking macrophotos - I must send him a link to this site... see if he can be inspired to look at the soil.
More soil information can be found here. They have a very complicated world soil map - it uses GIS technology. I went on a course about this... But I can't say that helps me navigate the map very well. Still, you can zoom right in to any area - like where the Reserve is, for example. Maybe Sian the survey lady would be interested...
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