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Biochar applications have been shown to increase crop yields on acidic and low activity soils in the tropics but fewer positive yield responses have been reported for temperate soils. We hypothesized that even without a yield response, applying biochar to a Midwestern Mollisol could improve soil quality and plant nutrient availability because of the carbon it supplies and its conditioning effect....
Few studies have been conducted to understand phosphorus (P) dynamics in serpentinitic landscapes where soil P availability is often limited due to immobilization by abundant Fe minerals. The objective of this study was to determine soil-solid P speciation and hosting phases in the soil formed on serpentinitic landscapes using P K-edge X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy and...
Temperate rainforests have high conservation and natural resource value, but the soils of this bioregion have not previously been studied as a unit. Here we examine the soils of North America's Pacific coastal temperate rainforests, utilizing databases from the United States Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Canadian Centre for Land and Biological Resources Research to (i) identify the...
Directed soil sampling based on geospatial measurements of apparent soil electrical conductivity (EC a ) is a potential means of characterizing the spatial variability of any soil property that influences EC a including soil salinity, water content, texture, bulk density, organic matter, and cation exchange capacity. Multi-field EC a survey data often exhibit abrupt changes...
In saline soils, the spectral reflectance of either salt features at the surface or of vegetation that was negatively affected by salt varies with different salinity levels. Thus, several indices for vegetation and soil salinity have been developed. This study was conducted to assess the soil salinity levels in the Al-Hassa Oasis, which is dominated by date palm vegetation, in the eastern province...
Current environmental research is paying increasing attention to reliable analytical surrogates of soil quality. In this work a series of molecular features of soil organic matter were studied in different soil types from Central Spain with the purpose of identifying the soil functions most closely correlated with specific pools of soil organic matter and their structural characteristics. Soil physical...
The conversion of spruce monocultures towards mixed and deciduous tree stands has been undertaken in central European countries, including south-western Poland. There is, however, still insufficient knowledge on the results of this transformation on the soil organic matter pools and humus forms. Thus, this study was focused on the relationship between altitude (a climatic factor), bedrock and soil...
Digital soil morphometrics is defined as the application of tools and techniques for measuring and quantifying soil profile attributes and deriving continuous depth functions. This paper reviews how proximal soil sensing and other tools can be used in soil profile descriptions where techniques and toolkits have not changed in the past decades. The application of such tools is compared to standard...
The present work was aimed at evaluating, under laboratory conditions, the medium-term influence of pepper residues applied at different rates (2, 3 and 5gkg −1 ) on carbon and nitrogen cycles in an agricultural soil. The cumulative quantities of CO 2 –C that evolved from the pepper residue mineralization were fitted to a first-order kinetic model. These values are equivalent to ~30%...
Mining activities in the abandoned São Domingos mine (Portugal, Iberian Pyrite Belt, IPB) generated a large amount of sulphide-rich waste rocks and tailings. Erica andevalensis Cabezudo and Rivera and Erica australis L. plants grow spontaneously in contaminated sites that have high concentrations of potentially hazardous elements, high acidity and nutrient deficiency. The aim of this paper was to...
A field experiment was conducted during the period of 2011 to 2012 to study the effect of traffic on physical properties of soil when different turfgrass species were cultivated. Experimental plots were established with three replications in a split-plot design with species as a main plot and traffic treatment as a subplot. The traffic treatment was applied to the turfgrass using Brinkman traffic...
During the last several decades, a large proportion of the planet's terrestrial surface has transformed from natural ecosystems to human-dominated systems. These land-use dynamics affect ecosystems' soil quality. The current study was conducted at the fringe of the northern Negev Desert, Israel, and strived to assess and compare the soil quality in three different land-use types (afforestation, traditional...
Dynamics of reclaimed coastal soils under cultivation has not been well understood. In this study, we analyzed major soil chemical properties under two cropping systems (rice–barley vs. cotton–barley cropping systems) along a 60-year soil chronosequence created by intermittent reclamation of coastal salt marshes in Shangyu, Zhejiang Province of China. Soil horizons were identified and selected pedogenic...
A red clay subsoil is commonly found in the soils of the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, USA. The red clay is buried by a layer of loess and occurs on uplands underlain by dolostone. It is assumed to have derived from the impurities of the weathered dolostone. The red clay has implications for groundwater recharge and lateral flow of water through the landscape as well as the fixation of excess phosphorus...
Soil mapping is a major goal of soil science. Soil maps rely upon accurate base maps, both for positional reference and to provide environmental data that can assist in the prediction of soil properties. This paper reviews the historical development of base maps used for soil mapping, and evaluates the dependence of soil mapping on base maps. The availability of geographic technology for producing...
We evaluated heavy metal contamination (Cr, Cu, Mn, Ni, Pb, and Zn) in soils from the copper mine in Touro, NW Spain. Their total content and geochemical phase distribution were determined using sequential chemical extraction. Representative soils from the area were selected and the objectives were to analyse the total content of heavy metals and their distribution in the different geochemical soil...
Most pedotransfer functions (PTFs) have adopted soil texture information as the main predictor to estimate soil hydraulic properties, whether inputs are defined in terms of the relative proportion of different grain size particles or texture-based classifications. The objective of this study was to develop ternary diagrams for estimating soil water retention (θ) at −33 and −1500kPa matric potentials,...
A series of paddy soil profiles with approximately 50, 300, 700 and 1000years of paddy cultivation history and an uncultivated mud beach profile under nearly identical landscape and climate conditions were studied. The signatures of rare earth elements (REEs) were used to identify sediment provenances and parent material uniformity of the studied profiles and to assess long-term paddy management effects...
Impacts of land intensification on soil organic carbon (SOC) responses are important components of sustainable management evaluation. Because of poor aggregation often associated with coarse-textured soils and the limited potential for chemical and physical protection of SOC, we hypothesized that the fine aggregate fraction (<53μm) represents an important sink for SOC stabilization in sandy soils...
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