The paper reviews a set of soil surveys carried out in Iran using a geopedologic approach for different surveying aims in different scales. Most of these studies have implemented a similar survey method including the following steps: delineation of landforms from air photos using geomorphic and soil-landscape relationships, field check of the delineations, sample areas inventory with soils clas...

Soil sample from a site heavily contaminated with >10 wt.% zinc is sampled and extracted with aqueous solutions of ethylene diamine tetra-acetic cid (EDTA) that is a reagent frequently used to extract heavy metals in soil remediation. Three liquid/soil ratios (5/1, 20/1, and 100/1) were used n the extracting experiment. The molecular environment of the residual Zn in the EDTA-extract residues o...

In Gram-negative bacteria, quorum sensing is mediated by N-acylhomoserine lactones (AHL) to regulate different biological functions, including production of virulence factors. Quorum quenching refers to the interruption of quorum sensing, and the most attractive way is to degrade the AHL molecules. With the aim of isolating soil bacteria capable of blocking quorum sensing by inactivating AHL, a...

Computed tomography (CT) is a technique that provides images of different solid and porous materials. CT could be an ideal tool to study representative sizes of soil samples because of the noninvasive characteristic of this technique. The scrutiny of such representative elementary sizes (RESs) has been the target of attention of many researchers related to soil physics field owing to the strong...

The efficiency of Bacillus subtilis DM-04 and Pseudomonas aeruginosa M and NM strains isolated from a petroleum contaminated soil sample from North-East India was compared for the biodegradation of crude petroleum-oil hydrocarbons in soil and shake flask study. These bacterial strains could utilize crude petroleum-oil hydrocarbons as sole source of carbon and energy. Bioaugmentation of TPH cont...

MDA is designed as a test bed for an astrobiology field instrument to detect microbial metabolic activity in terrestrial or extraterrestrial geological soil samples. MDA employs electrochemical sensors in a unique differential chamber configuration, able to detect minute changes in the chemical composition between the two otherwise identical chambers. Both chambers are filled with identical aut...

Estimating the species richness of microorganisms is of great importance in predicting, maintaining and managing microbial communities. Although the roles of environmental heterogeneity and geographical distance in structuring soil microbial communities have been studied intensively, the effects of environmental and spatial variation on the species richness estimation have not been examined. To...

The sugar-flotation-sieving (SFS) and Baermann-funnel (BF) methods were compared for nematode extraction efficiency. The SFS method recovered nematodes from more trophic groups whereas greater total numbers of individuals were recovered by BF. In a test to validate the efficiency of SFS, virtually 100% of the nematodes added to desert soil prior to extraction were recovered by four consecutive ...

A simple and convenient liquid chromatographic method has been developed and applied to the analysis of the novel aminothiazolecarboxamide fungicide, ethaboxam, in soil and crops. After the isolation and concentration of analyte from soil and crops, clean-up and separation of sample solutions are performed by high-performance liquid chromatography with online solid-phase extraction. Good linear...

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...