Plant communities are coupled with abiotic factors, as species diversity and community composition both respond to and influence climate and soil characteristics. Interactions between vegetation and abiotic factors depend on plant functional types (PFT) as different growth forms will have differential responses to and effects on site characteristics. However, despite the importance of different...

need to increasing agricultural land in order to improve food resources in the past two centuries recentlead to widespread changes in land use and improper management of these lands. continue thisprocess can lead to land degradation and desertification, and improve such soils is very costly;therefore, prevention of land degradation is more desirable. this function requires to research on theuti...

in recent decades, large investments have been made to introduce soil conservation methods, but most of these efforts have had limited success in achieving the goals. as a result, attempt to identify the factors deterring or promoting adoption of soil conservation practices is important. therefore, this study aimed to investigate factors affecting adoption of soil conservation practices by rain...

infiltration rate of water into the soil depends on the factors such as rock and litter cover, canopy cover, rainfall intensity, coarse material, land slope, soil texture and amount of initial soil moisture. the most important factors that are effective in the water infiltration rate of rangelands are livestock trampling and vegetation reduction due to the overgrazing. in present study, through...

Land-use change has a crucial influence on soil respiration, which further affects soil nutrient availability and carbon stock. We monitored soil respiration rates under different land-use types (tea gardens with three production levels, adjacent woodland, and a vegetable field) in Eastern China at weekly intervals over a year using the dynamic closed chamber method. The relationship between so...

Agriculture significantly contributes to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and there is a need to develop effective mitigation strategies. The efficacy of methods to reduce GHG fluxes from agricultural soils can be affected by a range of interacting management and environmental factors. Uniquely, we used the Taguchi experimental design methodology to rank the relative importance of six fact...

Metacommunity theory proposes that a collection of local communities are linked by dispersal and the resulting compositions are a product of both niche-based (species sorting) and spatial processes. Determining which of these factors is most important in different habitats can provide insight into the regulation of community assembly. To date, the metacommunity organization of heterotrophic soi...

Quantifying spatial distributions and spatially-explicit relationships of soil carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) and environmental factors allows us to derive functional relationships and assess anthropogenic induced nutrient imbalances. The objectives of this study were to: (i) characterize geospatial patterns of C, N, and P across a large subtropical region in the southeastern U.S.,...

A. Mukherjee Department of Geology & Geophysics, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal 721302, India Abstract Irrigation with arsenic (As)-rich groundwater in agricultural soil is one of the major causes for As contamination in rice. This can be observed in Bangladesh where the highest levels of As were reported in rice grains. However, As risk assessment in rice base...