Knorr et al. (2005) concluded that soil organic carbon pools with longer turnover times are more sensitive to temperature. We show that this conclusion is equivocal, largely dependent on their specific selection of data and does not persist when the data set of Kätterer et al. (1998) is analysed in a more appropriate way. Further, we analyse how statistical properties of the model parameters ma...

Geosynthetics have proved to be suitable for reinforced soil retaining walls. Based on the increasing uses of geosynthetic reinforced soil systems in the regions, which bear frequent earthquakes, the study of dynamic behavior of structures seems necessary. Determining the reinforcement forces is; therefore, one of the most important and main points of discussions in designing retaining walls, b...

Robust models for predicting soil salinity that use visible and near-infrared (vis-NIR) reflectance spectroscopy are needed to better quantify soil salinity in agricultural fields. Currently available models are not sufficiently robust for variable soil moisture contents. Thus, we used external parameter orthogonalization (EPO), which effectively projects spectra onto the subspace orthogonal to...

Long-term carbon (C) cycle feedbacks to climate depend on the future dynamics of soil organic carbon (SOC). Current models show low predictive accuracy at simulating contemporary SOC pools, which can be improved through parameter estimation. However, major uncertainty remains in global soil responses to climate change, particularly uncertainty in how the activity of soil microbial communities w...

The state of compactness is an important soil structure and quality attribute, and there is a need to ®nd a parameter for its characterization that gives directly comparable values for all soils. The use of some relative bulk density value for this purpose, particularly the degree of compactness (HaÊkansson, 1990), is discussed in this review. The degree of compactness has been de®ned as the dr...

investigation of soil properties like cation exchange capacity (cec) plays important roles in study of environmental reaserches as the spatial and temporal variability of this property have been led to development of indirect methods in estimation of this soil characteristic. pedotransfer functions (ptfs) provide an alternative by estimating soil parameters from more readily available soil data...

[1] Soil depth is an important input parameter in hydrological and ecological modeling. Presently, the soil depth data available in national soil databases (STATSGO and SSURGO) from the Natural Resources Conservation Service are provided as averages within generalized land units (map units). Spatial uncertainty within these units limits their applicability for distributed modeling in complex te...