Soil erosion continues to be a threat to agricultural productivity worldwide, with soil losses in the United States exceeding 3 billion tons annually. Wind and water erosion have caused dramatic declines in soil productivity. Erosion protection and associated conservation of nutrients, organic matter, soil water holding capacity and biota are significant concerns. Pimentel et al. (1995) estimat...

Beyond grazing, managed grasslands provide ecological services that may offer economic incentives for multifunctional use. Increasing biodiversity of plant communities may maximize net primary production by optimizing utilization of available light, water, and nutrient resources; enhance production stability in response to climatic stress; reduce invasion of exotic species; increase soil OM; re...

Historically, the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) evolved under seasonally-flooded conditions that predominately supported sawgrass and other wetland vegetation. Over several thousand years, Histosol “muck” soils were deposited as organic matter accumulated above the limestone (calcium carbonate) bedrock. In the early 1900s, these soils were drained. Declining water table levels coupled with...

Subsoiling is becoming a standard practice to alleviate detrimental soil compaction following biomass harvesting in eastside pine and mixed conifer forests in California. Compaction of soil following the harvesting can be detrimental to growth of residuals, to establishment of natural regeneration, and may change long term soil productivity. The short and long term effects of this subsoiling pr...

A practical model of the soil structure dynamics in ploughed ®elds can be a powerful aid to farmers attempting to optimise their management practices. This paper describes a compartmental model that simulates the changes over several years in an indicator of the effects of cropping systems on soil structure. This indicator, the proportion of severely compacted clods in the ploughed layer, was m...

This paper presents an automated method for creating spatial maps of soil condition with an outdoor mobile robot. Effective soil mapping on farms can enhance yields, reduce inputs and help protect the environment. Traditionally, data are collected manually at an arbitrary set of locations, then soil maps are constructed offline using Kriging, a form of Gaussian process regression. This process ...