Warming due to global climate change is predicted to reach 2°C in tropical latitudes. There is an alarming paucity of information regarding the effects of air temperature on tropical agroecosystems, including foraging pastures. Here, we investigated the effects of a 2°C increase in air temperature over ambient for 30 days on an established tropical pasture (Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brazil) do...

Near-surface soil moisture is an important parameter in hydrological, meteorological and agricultural applications. Passive microwave observations, both airborne and satellite, can be used to infer near-surface soil moisture. The brightness temperature of the thermal radiation that crosses the soil–air interface is the product of the soil emissivity and the effective temperature. At L-band, the...

Soil is a complicated system whose components and mechanisms are complex and difficult to be fully excavated and comprehended. Nitrogen is the key parameter supporting plant growth and development, and is the material basis of plant growth as well. An accurate grasp of soil nitrogen information is the premise of scientific fertilization in precision agriculture, where near infrared sensors are ...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to determine response patterns and mechanisms of soil respiration to precipitation increases in subtropical regions. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Field plots in three typical forests [i.e. pine forest (PF), broadleaf forest (BF), and pine and broadleaf mixed forest (MF)] in subtropical China were exposed under either Double Precipitation (DP) treatment o...

abstract in order to study the effects of soil texture and temperature on atrazine degradation, an experiment was conducted in completely randomized design with factorial arrangement and 3 replications. experimental factors included, soil texture (sandy loam and silty clay), temperature(10, 20 and 30 oc) and 4 incubation periods(0, 20, 40 and 60 days). soil was spiked with atrazine at a rate of...

Soil temperature can exhibit considerable memory fromweather and climate signals and is among the most important initial conditions in numerical weather and climate models. Consequently, a more accurate longterm land surface soil temperature dataset is needed to improve weather and climate simulation and prediction, and is also important for the simulation of agricultural crop yield and ecologi...

In predicting wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) phenology, logic suggests that basing thermal unit accumulation on near-surface soil temperature should give a better representation of shoot apex thermal unit accumulation than air temperature until internode elongation raises the apex above the soil surface. A study was undertaken to determine if predictions of winter wheat phenology are improved whe...

Understanding the effects of stand age and forest type on soil respiration is crucial for predicting the potential of soil carbon sequestration. Thus far, however, there is no consensus regarding the variations in soil respiration caused by stand age and forest type. This study investigated soil respiration and its temperature sensitivity at three stand ages (5, 10, and 20 or 30 years) in two p...

After decades of research, we are starting to understand more about why the number of species varies from place to place on the planet. However, little is known about spatial variation in abundance, especially for soil-dwelling organisms. In this study, we aimed to disentangle the relative influences of climatic factors, soil properties, and plant diversity on the abundance of soil-dwelling inv...

The responses of soil respiration to environmental conditions have been studied extensively in various ecosystems. However, little is known about the impacts of temperature and moisture on soils respiration under biological soil crusts. In this study, CO2 efflux from biologically-crusted soils was measured continuously with an automated chamber system in Ningxia, northwest China, from June to O...