Soil quality assessment may be one of the most contentious topics ever debated by the soil science community. Our objective is to examine the history, present status, and potential for using soil quality assessment as a tool to monitor soil physical, chemical, and biological effects of management decisions that may affect soil and water resources. Differences between inherent and dynamic soil q...

s. Bloodworth, H., and T. Sobecki. 2002. Land use biodiversity index as a soil quality indicator. In Making conservation tillage conventional: Building a future on 25 years of research; Proceedings of 25 Annual Southern Conservation Tillage Conference for Sustainable Agriculture, Auburn, AL, USA, 24-26 June, 2002, Pp.219-221. E. van Santen, editor. Auburn, AL: Alabama Agricultural Experiment St...

The use of data from multiple sensors is often required to ensure data coverage and continuity, but differences in the spectral characteristics of sensors result in spectral index values being different. This study investigates spectral response function effects on 48 spectral indices for cultivated grasslands using simulated data of 10 very high spatial resolution sensors, convolved from field...

Soil erosion is a serious problem especially in northern parts of Iran. One themost important side effects on soil erosion may be the decline in qualities of soil refers toagricultural productivity. So it is very important to assess the soil erosion risk for thesustainable development of agriculture. This study outlines ways undertaken to provide anew tool to manage water erosion from physical ...

The grain size composition of topsoil characterizes the soil texture and other physical properties. The coarsening of topsoil grain size is a visible symbol of land degradation; thereby the change in topsoil grain size can be potentially used to monitor desertification using remote sensing. This study proposes a new index for detecting topsoil grain size composition through ground in situ soil ...

The goal of sustainable agriculture is to maintain a non-negative trend in productivity while maintaining soil quality. Our main objective was to determine the sustainability of organic cropping systems. Three of the selected farms were in organic production for three, six and nine years since certification, and a fourth in conventional production. We found significant relationships between som...

A previously developed reflectance-based crop coeJficient (Kcr) for corn, estimated from the normalized difference vegetation index (ND VI), has been shown to overestimate the basal crop coe~cient (KeQ for corn by 24% or more when used with a dark-colored soil. This overestimation occurs because the NDVI produces larger index values for the same vegetation amount over dark backgrounds. Thus, th...

Soil physical properties have an important role on vegetation growththrough affecting the development of root system. The aim of this study was toinvestigate the trampling effect of livestock grazing on soil physical properties andvegetation cover changes. The experiment was conducted on three range conditionsites (Reference, Key and Critical area) with ten frequencies in HosseinabadeKudistan i...