As one of soil dynamics properties, soil moisture content is an important factor of soil fertility which counts for much to crop growth situation and scientific irrigation management. A design plan of regional spatial variation of soil moisture measurement was introduced. Its main job includes the use of differential GPS technology for each sampling points in farmland, collecting data of high-p...

Routing allocation scheme is a core issue in agricultural machinery allocation. It is related to the allocation cost, income and timeliness of crop harvest. How to select a farmland spot to harvest, which needs to consider not only the distance between a farmland spot and an agricultural machinery spot, but also road condition, farmland area, types of agricultural machinery and weather conditio...

Identification of the sources of soil mercury (Hg) on the provincial scale is helpful for enacting effective policies to prevent further contamination and take reclamation measurements. The natural and anthropogenic sources and their contributions of Hg in Chinese farmland soil were identified based on a decision tree method. The results showed that the concentrations of Hg in parent materials ...

Human-driven land-use changes increasingly threaten biodiversity. In agricultural ecosystems, abandonment of former farmlands constitutes a major land-use shift. We examined the relationships between areas in which agriculture has been abandoned and the distribution records of threatened plant species across Japan. We selected 23 plant species that are currently identified as threatened but wer...

China is rapidly urbanizing and will inevitably face trade-offs between promoting economic growth through further urbanization and protecting fertile farmland against accelerated urban expansion. This paper presents how this dilemma is being addressed in one of the most rapidly urbanizing regions in China, the Pearl River Delta (PRD), by means of assessing urban growth and farmland dynamic, as ...

The present study analyzed road soils collected near the dismantling workshops of an e-waste recycling region in South China to determine the PBDE profiles. Farmland soils at a distance of about 2 km from the dismantling workshops were also collected to evaluate the potential dispersion and deposition of PBDEs in the surrounding environment. Total PBDE concentrations ranged from 191 to 9156 ng/...

and a dry, dusty climate where frequent air inversions can cause smoke to linger for days. While McCarthy admits he cannot prove that any particular patient has been injured by the smoke, he says his medical experience is persuasive. For example, he says, patients who travel during the burning season tell him, "As soon as I get out of Spokane, I feel better, and as soon as I get back, I feel wo...

The afforestation of abandoned farmland significantly influences soil organic carbon (OC). However, the dynamics between OC inputs after afforestation and the original OC are not well understood. To learn more about soil OC dynamics after afforestation of farmland, we measured the soil OC content in paired forest and farmland plots in Shaanxi Province, China. The forest plots had been establish...

This study aims to determine the accuracy level at which different forms of land degradation can be mapped from medium-resolution satellite data, and to assess how accurately degraded land can be detected from multi-temporal satellite images. Land degradation in the form of salinization and waterlogging in Tongyu County, western Jilin Province of Northeast China was mapped from Landsat TM and A...

The demand for agricultural products continues to grow rapidly, but further agricultural expansion entails substantial environmental costs, making recultivating currently unused farmland an interesting alternative. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to widespread abandonment of agricultural lands, but the extent and spatial patterns of abandonment are unclear. We quantified the extent...