Cultivation of legume plants is well known to improve soil N level and net primary productivity; besides, it may deliver other ecosystem benefits such as increasing soil carbon sequestration and soil food web complexity. However, little is known about whether legumes can improve the resistance of soils to ecosystem disturbances. In the present study, we compared the resistance of soils to an ec...

Soil moisture is a critical process in the water cycle and its assessment is of paramount importance to forecast changes in the water balance of a region. Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) technology overcomes the limitations of point data by producing a tridimensional view of subsurface characteristics with a large economy of time, logistic, data processing and analysis. The purpose of this resea...

This research investigated how the strength of vegetation-soil-topography couplings varied along a gradient of biogeomorphic succession in two distinct fluvial systems: a forested river floodplain and a coastal salt marsh creek. The strength of couplings was quantified as tri-variance, which was calculated by correlating three singular axes, one each extracted using three-block partial least sq...

Effects of blowdown, salvage logging, and wildfire on regeneration and fuel characteristics in Minnesota's forests" (2011). ABSTRACT The patchiness resulting from a sequence of recent disturbances – blowdown, salvage logging, and wildfire – provided an excellent opportunity to assess the impacts of these disturbances, singly and in combination, on (1) wildfire severity (2) post-disturbance vege...

Subsoiling (SS) is an important technology in conservation tillage, but soil-disturbance characteristics the SS are rarely described. Research on during conducive to design and optimization of subsoilers, which provides a basis for reducing draft force energy consumption. This study conducted experiments at five different tillage depths field with specific situ test-rig facility, videotaping wa...

One hundred and nine soil samples were collected in 69 different localities along two transects, one North– South, about 900 km in length, and the other East–West (750 km in length), across Senegal and Gambia. The first transect followed a rainfall gradient and the second a human density gradient. The relationship between carbon content, C/N ratio and soil type on the abundance and species dist...

The use of herbicides is a common and intensive practice in no tillage systems. The herbicides can influence, directly or indirectly, the population of edaphic arthropods. Collembola is a group that functions as a bio-indicator of soil conditions. The degree of abundance and diversity of Collembola provides the level of soil disturbance provoked by agricultural practices. This experiment was de...

In mountain regions around the world, downhill ski areas represent a significant source of anthropogenic disturbance while also providing recreation and revenue. Ski-run creation always results in some level of disturbance, but disturbance intensity varies greatly with construction method. Ski runs may be established either by clearing (cutting and removing tall vegetation) or by clearing and t...

Some of the finest surviving natural habitat in the United States is on military reservations where land has been protected from development. However, responsibilities of military training often require disturbance of that habitat. Herein, we show how the soil microbial community of a long-leaf pine ecosystem at Fort Benning, Georgia responds to military traffic disturbances. Using the soil mic...

We investigated the power of near infrared (NIR) analysis for the quantitative assessment of soil quality in a wildfire chronosequence. The effect of wildfire disturbance and soil engineering activity of earthworms on soil organic matter quality was first assessed with principal component analysis of NIR spectra. Three soil quality indices were further calculated using an adaptation of the meth...