Tillage selection is just one of the issues that farmers must address when making crop production decisions. Among the factors that will influence the choice of tillage for a given field is the condition of the residue and soil in the field; the residue management practices needed to meet conservation plan specifications; the tools, time, and money that are available; the need to incorporate am...

The potential of Synthetic Aperture Radars (SARs) for measuring soil moisture has been recognised about 30 years ago, but still today the search for suitable sensors and widely applicable soil moisture retrieval algorithms is on-going. Because it is now important to find new directions in SAR soil moisture research, the current state of the art in SAR technology and methodological issues must b...

Much of the agricultural land in the Central Hills area of the Sichuan Basin is at risk from soil erosion by water. An investigation of rates and patterns of soil erosion on agricultural land near Yanting was undertaken using the caesium-137 technique. Erosion of the upper parts of sloping fields was found to be severe, with rates of the order of 20 to 50 t ha" year". However, infield depositio...

Theoretical models predict weakening of negative biotic interactions and strengthening of positive interactions with increasing abiotic stress. However, most empirical tests have been restricted to plant-plant interactions. No empirical study has examined theoretical predictions of interactions between plants and below-ground micro-organisms, although soil biota strongly regulates plant communi...

Improving nitrogen (N) use efficiency in crop production is important for obvious economic and environmental reasons. Nitrogen fertilization of corn usually provides the greatest return on investment of any crop input; therefore, farmers and their agricultural advisors must insure adequate N is available for the crop to maximize yields and economic returns. Soil contains N in organic (soil orga...

The rhizosphere is a densely populated area in which plant roots must compete with invading root systems of neighboring plants for space, water, and mineral nutrients, and with other soil-borne organisms, including bacteria and fungi. Root-root and root-microbe communications are continuous occurrences in this biologically active soil zone. How do roots manage to simultaneously communicate with...

An appreciation of the dynamism of the links between soil resources and society provides a platform for examining food security over the next 50 years. Interventions to reverse declining trends in food security must recognize the variable resilience and sensitivity of major tropical soil types. In most agro-ecosystems, declining crop yield is exponentially related to loss of soil quality. For t...

Soil-plant-man is recognized as a major pathway for the transfer of radionuclides to human beings [(Safety Series, No. 57 (IAEA 1982)]. The radioactivity of environmental samples from sites and products suspected of contamination must be investigated before free access to them is given to the public (Owono 2010). Radionuclides in soils are frequently transferred to different plant tissues by di...

Using a climate version of a regional atmospheric model, we show that the seasonal evolution of weather is dependent on the initial soil moisture and landscape specification. Coupling this model to a land-surface model, the soil moisture distribution and landscape are shown to cause a significant nonlinear interaction between vegetation growth and precipitation. These results demonstrate that s...

Many environmental problems caused by endocrine disrupters (EDs) have been reported. Because little is known about the fate of EDs accumulated in sewage sludge, we carried out a study to clarify the fate of EDs in composted sludge after its application to soil. Nonylphenol (NP) and 17beta-estradiol (E2) were measured for leachate and soil. High concentrations of NP and E2 were detected in the l...