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We investigated changes in soil carbon (C) cycling with reforestation across a long-term, replicated chronosequence of tropical secondary forests regrowing on abandoned pastures. We applied CP MAS 13 C NMR spectroscopy and radiocarbon modeling to soil density fractions from the top 10 cm to track changes in C chemistry and turnover during secondary forest establishment on former pastures....
Soil fertility depletion in smallholder agricultural systems in sub-Saharan Africa presents a formidable challenge both for food production and environmental sustainability. A critical constraint to managing soils in sub-Saharan Africa is poor targeting of soil management interventions. This is partly due to lack of diagnostic tools for screening soil condition that would lead to a robust and repeatable...
Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) is a widespread technique for measurement of soil water content (SWC). The main assumption behind the use of Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) is of negligible losses, therefore assuming that only the real part determines the value of the TDR-measured apparent dielectric permittivity. This assumption does not hold for soils where surfaces are conductive (clay soils) or...
Geostatistics is commonly used to describe and predict the variation of soil properties over the landscape. However, many geostatistical methods require the assumption that our observed data are a realization of a random function which is intrinsically stationarity. Under stationarity, observations of a single realization of the random function at different positions can be treated as a form of replication...
A weathering sequence with soils developing on volcanic, trachy-basaltic parent materials with ages ranging from 100–115,000 years in the Etna region served as the basis to analyse and calculate the accumulation and stabilisation mechanisms of soil organic matter (SOM), the transformation of pedogenic Fe and Al, the formation and transformation of clay minerals, the weathering indices and, by means...
This study investigated the use of Fourier transform infrared photoacoustic spectroscopy (FTIR-PAS) for rapid identification of agricultural soil samples. The PAS spectra of 166 air-dried samples belonging to five Mediterranean soil types most common in Israeli agriculture were recorded. The various soil types exhibited distinctive mid-IR bands, especially around the 2900–3700 cm −1 , 2500–2550 cm...
Recent advances in on-the-go soil sensing, terrain modelling and yield mapping have made available large quantities of information about the within-field variability of soil and crop properties. But the selection of the key variables for an identification of management zones, required for precision agriculture, is not straightforward. To investigate a procedure for this selection, an 8 ha agricultural...
The relationship and mechanisms among weathering processes, cation fluxes, clay mineralogy, organic matter composition and stability were studied in soils developing on basaltic material in southern Italy (Sicily). The soils were transitions between Phaeozems and Vertisols. Intense losses of the elements Na, Ca and Mg were measured indicating that weathering has occurred over a long period of time...
We investigated soil samples from a Vertisol in a flat lying flood plain in the savannah woodland of southern Mali, which is characterized by a water regime governed by regularly occurring wet and dry seasons. The soil was subdivided into four horizons which differed in the content and speciation of the redox-sensitive elements and in the length of waterlogging. Magnetically, the profile could be...
Estimates of the amount of Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) at the regional scale are important to better understand the role of the SOC reservoir in global climate and environmental issues. This study presents a method for estimating the total SOC stock using data from Flanders (Belgium). More than 6900 SOC measurements from the national soil survey (database ‘Aardewerk’) are combined with a digital land...
It is not clear from the literature whether heavy grazing leads to a deterioration of physical and chemical parameters of topsoils in steppe ecosystems. We sampled five sites in northern China with different grazing intensities, ranging from ungrazed since 1979 to heavily grazed, at 540 sampling points to a depth of 0–4 cm. Each sample was analysed for bulk density, organic carbon (OC), total nitrogen...
We compared Cr, Cu, Ni and Zn fractionation patterns in four typical soils naturally containing high levels of these elements on the tropical volcanic island of Réunion. Two sequential chemical extraction procedures were used: the modified four-stage BCR procedure (subsequently called mBCR) and the modified six-stage Geological Survey of Canada procedure (subsequently called mGSC). The results obtained...
Many tropical soils include sesquioxides, which influence the stability of soil organic matter (OM) and aggregation to an extent that is not fully characterized. The present study was carried out on a range of 18 topsoil samples (0–10 cm) from low-activity clay (LAC) soils from sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil, and aimed: (i) at characterizing the size distributions of water-stable aggregates and organic...
Bearing a total organic carbon (TOC) content of 9.3–10.7 kg C/m 2 , alpine grassland soils of the Qinghai–Tibet plateau's permafrost region bear a greater organic carbon pool than do grassland soils in other regions of China or than tropical savannah soils. The easily released light fraction organic carbon (LFOC) accounts for 34–54% of the TOC and is particularly enriched in the topsoil (0–0...
Most models of soil humic substances include a substantial component of aromatic C either as the backbone of humic heteropolymers or as a significant component of supramolecular aggregates of degraded biopolymers. We physically separated coarse (0.2–2.0 μm e.s.d.), medium (0.02–0.2 μm e.s.d.), and fine (>0.02 μm e.s.d.) clay subfractions from three Midwestern soils and characterized the organic...
This paper aims to investigate the potential of using soil-landscape pattern extracted from a soil map to predict soil distribution at unvisited location. Recent machine learning advances used in previous studies showed that the knowledge embedded within soil units delineated by experts can be retrieved and explicitly formulated from environmental data layers However, the extent to which the models...
This study was conducted to investigate the effect of time on lead (Pb), zinc (Zn), cadmium (Cd) and copper (Cu) availability in some calcareous soils of Iran. Heavy metals were added to soils at the rate of 500 mg kg −1 of Pb, Zn, and Cu and 8 mg kg −1 of Cd as chloride. The samples were incubated for 3 h, 1, 3, 7, 14, 21, and 28 days at 25 °C and constant moisture. After incubation,...
Soil organic carbon (SOC) is an important component of the global carbon cycle. Its dynamics depends upon various natural and anthropogenic factors including soil erosion. A study on Miamian silty clay loam soil in central Ohio was conducted to investigate the effect of soil erosion on SOC transport and mineralization. Runoff plots 10, 20 and 30 m long on a 7% slope under natural rainfall were used...
Soil desiccation usually takes place below the depth of soil affected by rainfall infiltration (about 1–3 m) with relatively low water content, and is one kind of particular hydrological phenomena in semi-arid and semi-humid regions of the Loess Plateau in China. This desiccation results from the excessive depletion of deep soil water by artificial vegetation and long-term insufficient rainwater supply,...
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