Soil aggregation was studied in a 21-year experiment conducted on an Anthrosol. The soil management regimes consisted of cropland abandonment, bare fallow without vegetation and cropping system. The cropping system was combined with the following nutrient management treatments: control (CONTROL, no nutrient input); nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK); straw plus NPK (SNPK); and manure (M) ...

The soil degradation caused by conventional tillage in rain-fed areas of northwest China is known to reduce the water-use efficiency and crop yield because of reduced soil porosity and the decreased availability of soil water and nutrients. Thus, we investigated the effects of straw incorporation on soil aggregates with different straw incorporation rates in semiarid areas of southern Ningxia f...

Conceptual models suggest that stability of organic carbon (OC) in soil depends on the source of plant litter, occlusion within aggregates, incorporation in organomineral complexes, and location within the soil profile. Density fractionation is a useful tool to study the relevance of OC stabilization in aggregates and in association with minerals, but it has rarely been applied to full soil pro...

Recently, we presented a steady-state analytical hillslope stability model to study rain-induced shallow landslides. This model is based on kinematic wave dynamics of saturated subsurface storage and the infinite slope stability assumption. Here we apply the model to investigate the effect of neglecting the unsaturated storage on the assessment of slope stability in the steady-state hydrology. ...

A critical step in the quantification of soil quality (SQ) is the selection of SQ benchmarks. The benchmarks used in this study were SQ ratings made by 32 farmer collaborators representing a range of farming systems, scales of operation and geographic locations in the Mid-Atlantic region of USA. Soils from 45 pairs of sites identified by their farmers as having good and poor SQ were sampled ove...

Thermal stability of soil organic matter responds to long-term fertilization practices J. Leifeld, U. Franko, and E. Schulz Air Pollution/Climate Group, Agroscope FAL Reckenholz, Swiss Federal Research Station for Agroecology and Agriculture, Switzerland UFZ – Umweltforschungszentrum Leipzig-Halle, Germany Received: 18 January 2006 – Accepted: 7 February 2006 – Published: 4 April 2006 Correspon...