Soil health is presented as an integrative property that reflects the capacity of soil to respond to agricultural intervention, so that it continues to support both the agricultural production and the provision of other ecosystem services. The major challenge within sustainable soil management is to conserve ecosystem service delivery while optimizing agricultural yields. It is proposed that so...

This study was conducted to develop fundamental relationships between soil properties from three representative Florida soil orders and their spectral characteristics. The ultimate goal of this work is to develop a real–time soil property sensor for use in effective farm management. A total of 270 samples collected from the three representative soil orders (Alfisol, Entisol, and Ultisol) in Flo...

The objective of this study was to explore the spatial variation of soil fertility quality and the influence factors of human land use and soil management practices on soil fertility quality in North China cities' urban fringe of Beijing using data for 2007 and grey relational analysis (GRA) and geographic information systems (GIS). Soil total nitrogen, available phosphorus, available potassium...

Many soil remote sensing applications rely on narrow-band observations to exploit molecular absorption features. However, broadband sensors are invaluable for soil surveying, agriculture, land management and mineral exploration, amongst others. These sensors provide denser time series compared to high-resolution airborne imaging spectrometers and hold the potential of increasing the observable ...

Under the European Union (EU) Thematic Strategy for Soil Protection, the European Commission has identified soil contamination as a priority for the collection of policy-relevant soil data at European scale. In order to support EU soil management policies, soil-related indicators need to be developed which requires appropriate data collection and establishment of harmonized datasets for the EU ...

The field experiments were conducted on sandy loam soil at New Delhi, during 2007 and 2008 to investigate the effect of conservation tillage, irrigation regimes (sub-optimal, optimal and supra-optimal water regimes), and integrated nutrient management (INM) practices on soil biological parameters in wheat cultivation. The conservation tillage soils has shown significant (p<0.05) increase in soi...

Soil quality and health are terms describing similar concepts, but the latter appeals to farmers and crop consultants as part of a holistic approach to soil management. We regard soil health as the integration and optimization of the physical, biological and chemical aspects of soils for improved productivity in an economic and sustainable manner. This paper describes the process used for the s...

In the present paper the yield and soil spatial variability in an apple orchard was studied. Apples were collected manually and placed in plastic bins along the tree rows. Yield per ten trees was weighted and the geographical position in the centre of the ten trees was recorded, using a GPS, in order to create the yield map. The orchard was divided in management zones with the Management Zone A...

Soil science is a relatively new discipline which has mainly developed since the 1880s. It uses terms, methods and processes borrowed from other basic disciplines like climatology, geology, chemistry, physics and biology, but with a direct application to soils. At present, it is difficult to speak about one single science but as soil sciences, as they cover several fields including: pedology (o...