In the western United States, mechanical thinning and prescribed fire are common forest management practices aimed at reducing potential wildfire severity and restoring historic forest structure, yet their effects on forest microclimate conditions are not well understood. We collected microclimate data between 1998 and 2003 in amixed-conifer forest in California’s Sierra Nevada. Air and soil te...

Rahman, S., Chen, Y., Zhang, Q. and Lobb, D. 2005. Evaluation methods on manure exposure from liquid manure injection tools. Canadian Biosystems Engineering/Le génie des biosystèmes au Canada 47: 6.9 6.16. Laboratory and field studies were conducted to explore evaluation methods on manure exposure (refer as to manure being not covered by soil, but exposed to the air) for liquid manure injection...

Moisture is an important consideration in many aspects ranging from irrigation, soil chemistry, golf course, corrosion and erosion, road conditions, weather predictions, livestock feed moisture levels, water seepage etc. Vegetation and crops always depend more on the moisture available at the root level than on precipitation occurrence. In this paper, design of an instrument is discussed which ...

Soil moisture retrieval from SAR images using semi-empirical or physically-based backscatter models requires surface roughness parameters, generally obtained by means of in situ measurements. However, measured roughness parameters often result in inaccurate soil moisture contents. Furthermore, when these retrieved soil moisture contents need to be used in data assimilation schemes, it is import...

Frost heave, which is the volumetric expansion of frozen soil, has great ecological significance, since it creates water storage spaces in soils at the beginning of the growing season in cold temperate forests. To understand the characteristics of frost heave in seasonally frozen soil and the factors that impact its extent, we investigated the frost heave rates of forest soil from different dep...

organic manure plays an important role in the improvement of soil structure by decreasing bulk density and increasing porosity. however, the method of manure spreading influences its beneficial impact on soil structure. in this study, a novel helical manure distributor machine capable of spreading manure with different moisture contents at maximum distribution width was developed and the machin...

The substrate-induced respiration inhibition (SIRIN) method of Anderson and Domsch for partitioning bacteria1 and fungal contributions to soil respiration was modified for application to dry soils. This new method also provided a comparative basis when measuring SIRIN in soils of different moisture contents. Soil was incubated under optimum moisture conditions (55% water-filled pore space) to m...

Soil respiration (Rs) is a combination of autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration, but it is oftenmodeled as a single efflux process, influenced by environmental variables similarly across all time scales. Continued progress in understanding sources of variation in soil CO2 efflux will require development of Rs models that incorporate environmental influences at multiple time scales. Coherenc...

Thin layer drying of Russian olive (Elaeagnusan gastifolial L.) fruit using a hot air dryer in order to calculate effective moisture diffusivity, activation energy and energy consumption has been evaluated in this article. The selected variables included three levels of air velocity of 0.5, 1 and 1.5 m/s and three air temperature levels of 50, 60 and 70°C. Increased air temperature...