Slurry injection below maize seeds is a rather new application technique developed to improve the nitrogen use efficiency of liquid organic manure. To enable the characterization of the spatial and temporal soil mineral nitrogen (SMN) dynamics after slurry injection the present study aims to develop an appropriate soil sampling strategy. Three consecutive experiments were conducted. The first t...

[1] The contrast between the point-scale nature of current ground-based soil moisture instrumentation and the ground resolution (typically >10 km) of satellites used to retrieve soil moisture poses a significant challenge for the validation of data products from current and upcoming soil moisture satellite missions. Given typical levels of observed spatial variability in soil moisture fields, t...

Strategies for sampling shallow soils at hazardous waste sites are employed primarily to evaluate levels and distributions of contamination. The ensuing analyses of potential public health impacts are therefore dependent on the sampling design rather than having the sampling design based on the data needs for evaluating potential public health impacts of shallow soil contamination. We define a ...

We tested for soil substrate effects on the movement and infectivity of naturally co-occurring entomopathogenic nematodes Steinernema feltiae and Heterorhabditis marelatus, alone and in combination. We manipulated the presence and bulk density of soil and added Galleria mellonella baits within capped and perforated 15mL centrifuge tubes. Sampling tubes were then deployed in situ into field and ...

Various methods to determine 222Rn concentration in soil gas were tested at two sites with different soil types in a depth of 1 m. They include instantaneous (spot), continuous (real time) and timeaveraging procedures with advective ('active' procedures) or diffusive ('passive' procedures) gas transport from soil to detector: a) active grab-sampling of soil gas from different thin soil gas prob...

Soil moisture is an important state variable in the hydrologic cycle, and its spatiotemporal distribution depends on many geophysical processes operating at different spatial and temporal scales. To achieve a better accounting of the water and energy budgets at the land-atmosphere boundary, it is necessary to better understand the spatiotemporal variability of soil moisture under different hydr...

Weeds tend to aggregate in patches within fields, and there is evidence that this is partly owing to variation in soil properties. Because the processes driving soil heterogeneity operate at various scales, the strength of the relations between soil properties and weed density would also be expected to be scale-dependent. Quantifying these effects of scale on weed patch dynamics is essential to...

ABSTRACT Soil sampling is a fundamental stage for recommending agricultural correctives and fertilizers, estimating the nutritional demands of plants, consequently maximizing productivity. Therefore, this study aimed to assess performance three soil samplers in different management systems terms sample quality operational efficiency. A completely randomized experimental design was used factoria...

Uniflagellate zoosporic "fungi" (=Chytridiomycota and the zoosporic protista Hyphochytriomycota) are common inhabitants of soil. However, at what scale differences in their spatial distribution can be detected is poorly known. The first objective of this study was to assess the association of organismal distribution and frequency with two microhabitats: moss-covered and exposed forest soils, at...