Soil receptivity to arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi tests the capacity of a soil to favour the mycorrhizal development after inoculation. Thus, receptivity is a key criterion to assess whether the introduction of non-indigenous AM fungi will successfully improve plant growth. Two experiments were set up to investigate the receptivity of a moderately acidic wheat-growing soil of the Argentinea...

Practices to promote tree root growth have been sought in arboriculture for many years, especially as a treatment for trees that are stressed or in decline. Tree fertilization is a common practice in arboriculture. A few research reports have shown that nitrogen fertilization can increase fine-root density in localized areas of soil where the fertilizer has been applied, but the effect on the w...

This study aims to evaluate the impacts of changes in litter quantity under simulated N deposition on litter decomposition, CO2 release, and soil C loss potential in a larch plantation in Northeast China. We conducted a laboratory incubation experiment using soil and litter collected from control and N addition (100 kg ha-1 year-1 for 10 years) plots. Different quantities of litter (0, 1, 2 and...

Theoretical arguments suggest that increased plant productivity may not only increase consumer densities but also their fluctuations. While increased consumer densities are commonly observed in fertilization experiments, experiments are seldom performed at a spatial and temporal scale where effects on population fluctuations may be observed. In this study we used a natural gradient in soil fert...

One of the major components of precision agriculture is the precision fertilization. The basic principle of precision fertilization is to adjust the fertilizer input according to the specific circumstances or properties of soils in each location for the least waste and the highest profit. The paper presents a feasible approach for developing the spatial distribution map of soil nutrients based ...

Chemical composition of soil organic carbon (SOC) is central to soil fertility. We hypothesize that change in SOC content resulting from various long-term fertilization strategies accompanies the shift in SOC chemical structure. This study examined the effect of fertilization strategies along with the time of fertilizer application on the SOC composition by 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) ...

We studied the effect of ectomycorrhizas and fertilization on soil microbial communities associated with roots of 10-year-old loblolly pine. Ectomycorrhizas were identified using a combination of community terminal restriction fragment profiling and matching of individual terminal restriction fragments to those produced from ectomycorrhizal clones and sequences recovered from roots and sporocar...

To meet growing food demand with limited land and reduced environmental impact, soil testing and formulated fertilization methods have been widely adopted around the world. However, conventional technology for investigating nitrogen fertilization rates (NFR) is time consuming and expensive. Here, we evaluated the use of visible near-infrared shortwave-infrared (VIS-NIR-SWIR: 400–2500 nm) spectr...

Understanding Zn uptake dynamics is critical to rice grain Zn biofortification. Here we examined soil Zn availability and Zn uptake pathways as affected by genotype (high-grain Zn varieties IR69428 and IR68144), Zn fertilization and water management in two pot experiments. Results showed significant interactions (P < 0.05) between genotypes and Zn fertilization on DTPA (diethylenetriaminepentaa...