Soil microorganisms are important for climate regulation as well as for plant nutrition. In agricultural soils the microorganisms are affected by management choices, like which type of tillage that is used. Moldboard plowing, the most common tillage practice, increases mineralization which leads to soil organic carbon (SOC) loss, and may thus reduce soil quality. Conservation tillage practices ...

A finite element program based on elastic –plastic model of Mohr-Coulomb criterion was used to evaluate the bearing capacity coefficients of soil under shallow strip flexible footing . The results were compared with others’ analytical results and it was found that the present study could offer quite consistent and rather precise values for the bearing capacity coefficients . The effect of d...

Sustainable management of crop productivity and health necessitates improved understanding of the ways in which rhizosphere microbial populations interact with each other, with plant roots and their abiotic environment. In this study we examined the effects of different soils and cultivars, and the presence of a soil-borne fungal pathogen, Verticillium dahliae, on the fungal microbiome of the r...

Mitigating soil erosion, especially in Mediterranean countries such as Greece, is essential in order to maintain environmental and agricultural sustainability. In this paper, scientific publications related to soil erosion studies in Greece were reviewed and categorized. To accomplish this, the online search engine of Scopus was used. The key words were “soil”, “erosion” and “Greece.” An analys...

This paper presents a very accurate sensor for the measurement of the moisture of undisturbed soil samples. The sensor relies on accurate estimation of the permittivity which is performed independently of the soil type, and a subsequent calibration. The sensor is designed as an upgrade of the conventional soil sampling equipment used in agriculture--the Kopecky cylinder. The detailed descriptio...

Paddy rice fields occupy broad agricultural area in China and cover diverse soil types. Microbial community in paddy soils is of great interest since many microorganisms are involved in soil functional processes. In the present study, Illumina Mi-Seq sequencing and functional gene array (GeoChip 4.2) techniques were combined to investigate soil microbial communities and functional gene patterns...

Tropical rain forests have the highest tree diversity on earth. Nonrandom spatial distributions of these species in relation to edaphic factors could be one mechanism responsible for maintaining this diversity. We examined the prevalence of nonrandom distributions of trees and palms in relation to soil type and topographic position (‘‘edaphic biases’’) over a mesoscale (573 ha) old-growth tropi...