This study investigated the development of fungal community composition in arable soil during the degradation of straw residue. We explored the short-term responses of the fungal community over 28 days of decomposition in soil using culture-independent polymerase chain reaction in combination with a clone library and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE). Fungal cellobiohydrolase I (cb...

Soil moisture is a key limiting resource in arid and semi-arid environments for woody shrub species. We assessed if three arid communities differed in their level of dry season soil moisture content and if the dominant species in these communities differed in their ability to use soil moisture. Water potential of all of the dominant woody plant species occurring in chaparral, coastal sage, and ...

On 60 m2 hillslope plots, at 18 mainly grassland locations in Switzerland rain was applied at rates of 50– 100 mm/h for between 3 and 6 h. The generated flows were measured, including overland flow, near surface and subsurface flow 0.5–1.3 m below the surface. At some locations less than 2% of the rain flowed down the slope either on or below the surface, whereas at some others more than 90% of...

Invasive knotweeds, native to Eastern Asia, are among the most dominant plant invaders of European and North American temperate ecosystems. Recent studies indicate that one cause of this dominance might be allelopathy, but the possible sources and modes of action of this allelopathy are insufficiently understood. Here, we asked whether the invasive knotweed Fallopia × bohemica can exert allelop...

J. Kihara et al. (eds.), Improving Soil Fertility Recommendations in Africa using the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT), DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2960-5_3, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012 Abstract Africa is the continent with the lowest fertilizer use per hectare notwithstanding the fact it possesses geologically old, infertile and degraded soils. This c...

Plant-fungal associations have been explored by routine cultivation based approaches and cultivation based approaches cannot catalogue more than 5% of fungal diversity associated with any niche. In the present study, an attempt has been made to catalogue fungal diversity associated with belowground parts i.e. rhizosphere and cormosphere, of Crocus sativus (an economically important herb) during...

Soil is a mixture of four components: air, free water, bound water and soil particles. The microwave dielectric constant of soil is strongly dependent on the soil moisture content. The dielectric constant is a measure of the response of a material to an applied electric field, such as an electromagnetic wave. It has a real and an imaginary component. Soil particles’ dielectric constant depends ...

Recent studies of soil–landscape relationships in northeastern Patagonia identified fibrous-clay minerals in calcic and petrocalcic horizons developed on old fluvio-glacial plains called “Rodados Patagónicos” (RP). The objectives of this study were: i) to evaluate the occurrence of fibrous-clay minerals in the arid soil environment, and ii) to establish the relationship between the soil propert...