... While assessing the effects of vegetation burning on soil properties, Mills Fey (2004) proposed the term pedoderm to describe those first few centimetres of soil in which certain properties are often expressed much more strongly than in the remainder of the soil surface horizon. ... The pedoderm hosts or serves as substrate for the formation of both biological and physical crusts of the kind described, respectively, by Belnap and Lange (2003) and Singer and Shainberg (2004). ... 2003; Cadenasso et...