1997). New interdisciplinary approaches are needed to improve the understanding of complex interactions bePrecision agriculture (PA) has recently been defined by the U.S. tween multiple factors affecting crop growth and farm National Research Council as a management strategy that uses information technologies to bring data from multiple sources to bear on decision making. Unbiased, systematic a...

Cement-based materials are fundamental resources used to in construction. The increase in requests for and consumption of cement products, especially in Iran, indicates that more cement plants should be equipped. This study developed a geographical information system using pairwise comparison based on grey numbers to identify potential sites in which to set up cement plants. A group of five exp...

The seventh international seminar on Vygotsky held in Geneva discussed a new French language translation of texts from ‘pedology,’ the now largely lost Soviet science developing child. In this introduction, guest editors touch three concepts development which coincide with elements Vygotsky’s best known idea, Zoped, or zone proximal development. each case, we find that pedological has potential...

In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was widespread pessimism on the status of soil science in most parts of the world. This was mainly due to dwindling research budgets, reduced number of students and the overall perception that soil science and pedology were dead and buried. Renewed interest in agriculture for food, feed and fuel has brought soils back onto the global research agenda. Soil ero...

Thermodynamic entropy was initially proposed by Clausius in 1865. Since then it has been implemented in the analysis of different systems, and is seen as a promising concept to understand the evolution of open systems in non-equilibrium conditions. Information entropy was proposed by Shannon in 1948, and has become an important concept to measure information in different systems. Both thermodyn...

We present an algorithm which efficiently segments very large categorical rasters based on patterns of their categories. It operates on a grid of motifels – square blocks of raster cells representing a local pattern. Our algorithm is based on the seeded region growing principle but it uses a novel grid topology and seeds stack with individual thresholds. It has a single free parameter – the spa...

This paper gives the dust emission inventory in the Northern China where the climate is very dry and large desert areas exist. Before calculating the distribution of fugitive dust emission factors (emission rates of particles smaller than 0.05 mm in diameter) from natural surfaces with a US EPA formula, Chinese data of pedology and climatology were processed so as to suit requirements of the fo...

Metagenomics commonly refers to the study of genetic materials directly derived from environments without culturing. Several ongoing large-scale metagenomics projects related to human and marine life, as well as pedology studies, have generated enormous amounts of data, posing a key challenge for efficient analysis, as we try to 1) understand microbial organism assemblage under different condit...