Soil organic carbon is a key soil property related to soil fertility, aggregate stability and the exchange of CO2 with the atmosphere. Existing soil maps and inventories can rarely be used to monitor the state and evolution in soil organic carbon content due to their poor spatial resolution, lack of consistency and high updating costs. Visible and Near Infrared diffuse reflectance spectroscopy ...

Sequestration and diffusion of three polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in seven Chinese soils were investigated for up to 200 days in sterile soil microcosms as functions of soil property and aging time. The aging of the PAHs, assessed using a mild extractant that removes primarily the labile fraction, showed a biphasic behavior. The rapid diffusion from labile to nonlabile domains was ma...

Total organic carbon (TOC) is the carbon (C) stored in soil organic matter (SOM). Organic carbon (OC) enters the soil through the decomposition of plant and animal residues, root exudates, living and dead microorganisms, and soil biota. SOM is the organic fraction of soil exclusive of nondecomposed plant and animal residues. Nevertheless, most analytical methods do not distinguish between decom...

Crust restoration is increasingly being done but we lack quantitative information on soil improvements. The study aimed to elucidate the dynamics involving soil microbial biomass carbon and soil dissolved organic carbon in the re-vegetation chronosequences of a hillslope land with purple soil in Hengyang, Hunan Province. The soil can cause serious disasters with both soil erosion and seasonal d...

Mangroves can capture and store organic carbon and their protection and therefore their restoration is a component of climate change mitigation. However, there are few empirical measurements of long-term carbon storage in mangroves or of how storage varies across environmental gradients. The context dependency of this process combined with geographically limited field sampling has made it diffi...

This discussion explores the possibility of having a measure of the biodegradable organic carbon content in solid wastes. Currently, indirect measures for determining the concentration of biodegradable organic matter are being used and most of them are based on respiration indices (oxygen consumption or carbon dioxide production) or chemical parameters (volatile solids or total organic carbon)....

In a partly urbanized catchment to the south of Trier, Germany, selected sediment samples were separated into different size fractions ranging from <2 urn to 200 urn. Each sample fraction was analysed for heavy metals, poly chlorinated biphenyls (PCB), poly cyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and organic carbon. The results show a linear correlation between heavy metal content and particle size....