Soil and landform information is needed for a wide range of applications but available data are often inaccessible, incomplete, or out of date. Within the European FP7 project ‘e-SOTER’, following recognised harmonisation principles, we developed an XML schema to serve as an exchange format for soil and terrain data derived from e-SOTER methodologies (SoTerML). It encompasses existing SOTER dat...

The last decade has seen a growing and renewed interest regarding anthropogenic soils which owe their dominant characteristics to past land management practices. These soils, besides being of particular pedological interest, are also of high archaeological significance given the high density of sites which frequently occurs on them. According to the World Reference Base for Soil Resources, anth...

abstract microbial contaminants transport to groundwater is a serious environmental problem that can result in large outbreaks of waterborne diseases. some of bacteria can travel from vadose zone and cause contamination of groundwater resources. thus, an accurate prediction of transport and fate of pathogenic microorganisms in unsaturated soil is needed to protect groundwater resources. the mai...

Background Soil microbial communities (SMC) play a central role in the structure and function of desert ecosystems. However, the high variability of annual precipitation could results in the alteration of SMC and related biological processes depending on soil water potential. The nature of the physiological adjustments made by SMC in order to obtain energy and nutrients remains unclear under di...

Question: We present a general structural carbon nutrient balance hypothesis parallel to Bryant et al.’s defensive chemistry hypothesis. Our hypothesis suggests that because herb species require a lower investment of carbon per unit length of stem than do woody plants, herbs should be at a competitive advantage where the leaf area of plants in the ground layer is limited by light (or fixed carb...

Jack A. Morgan is plant physiologist and Feike Dijkstra is post-doc research ecologist at the Rangeland Resources Research Unit, Ronald F. Follett is research leader and soil scientist and Stephen Del Grosso is a soil scientist and ecologist at the Soil Plant Nutrient Research Unit, USDA Agricultural Research Service Northern Plains Area, Fort Collins, Colorado. Leon Hartwell Allen Jr. is soil ...

A bioassay arena was developed to test the response of the Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica Newman (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae), to various plant-derived factors that may influence the selection of oviposition sites. In choice experiments with natural and artificial plant cues, females preferred to lay eggs in ryegrass rather than in artificial resources. Artificial grass stems received more eg...

It is important to indicate at the outset that I do not intend to argue for more funding for soil conservation programs, but rather for more efficient use of the resources presently committed. Before we can go very far in evaluating the impacts of soil conservation spending changes, we need additional background on soil conservation programs. It is hoped that such information will tell us somet...