The goal of sustainable agriculture is to maintain a non-negative trend in productivity while maintaining soil quality. Our main objective was to determine the sustainability of organic cropping systems. Three of the selected farms were in organic production for three, six and nine years since certification, and a fourth in conventional production. We found significant relationships between som...

This paper describes the first outcomes of an activity aiming at validating the H-SAF soil moisture products derived from METOP-ASCAT data. For this purpose, an extensive comparison between SMOS and ASCAT derived soil moisture retrievals has been accomplished by considering the 25 km resolution ASCAT products and the SMOS level 2 products. Both Europe and Northern Africa have been considered an...

plantations may influence soil fauna directly or indirectly. this research was conducted in order to study the influence of species plantations on soil macrofauna. plantations of eight tree species including nitrogen fixing trees and non-nitrogen fixing trees based on complete randomized block design with 3 replicates were established in 1372 in dez riverside. soil macrofauna were studied rando...

The relation between water content and potential is a key soil hydraulic property. presence of rock fragments in soils can affect this property bulk soil. In study, we focused on the determined with WP4 dew point potentiometer. objective was to evaluate hypothesis that breaking large gravel-size particles into smaller suitable strategy for accurate measurements coarse materials without affectin...

Soil bulk density is a physical property of soils that affects water storage, water and nutrient movement, and plant root activity in the soil profile. The ability to quantify soil bulk density using vibration-induced conductivity fluctuation was investigated with possible field applications in the future. The AC electrical conductance of soil was measured using a pair of blade-like electrodes ...

Soil moisture plays a key role in most environmental processes, as evaporation and transpiration are heavily dependent on soil moisture variability. While it is one of the few important hydrological variables that can be directly observed, the high spatial and temporal variability makes it difficult to measure globally or even regionally. Reliance is therefore placed on land surface models to p...

Soil porosity (ϕ) is of a great deal for environmental studies due to the fact that water infiltrates and suffers redistribution in the soil pore space. Many physical and biochemical processes related to environmental quality occur in the soil porous system. Representative determinations of ϕ are necessary due to the importance of this physical property in several fields of natural sciences. In...

Thinning is a crucial practice in the forest ecosystem management. The soil infiltration rate and water storage capacity of pine-oak mixed forest under three different thinning intensity treatments (15%, 30%, and 60%) were studied in Qinling Mountains of China. The thinning operations had a significant influence on soil infiltration rate and water storage capacity. The soil infiltration rate an...