Soil respiration, a major component of the global carbon cycle, is significantly influenced by land management practices. Grasslands are potentially a major sink for carbon, but can also be a source. Here, we investigated the potential effect of land management (grazing, clipping, and ungrazed enclosures) on soil respiration in the semiarid grassland of northern China. Our results showed the me...

Determining the influence of soil environmental factors on degradation of Cry1Ac protein from Bt cotton residues is vital for assessing the ecological risks of this commercialized transgenic crop. In this study, the degradation of Cry1Ac protein in leaves and in buds of Bt cotton in soil was evaluated under different soil water content and temperature settings in the laboratory. An exponential ...

[1] Application of time domain reflectometry (TDR) in soil hydrology often involves the conversion of TDR-measured dielectric permittivity to water content using universal calibration equations (empirical or physically based). Deviations of soil-specific calibrations from the universal calibrations have been noted and are usually attributed to peculiar composition of soil constituents, such as ...

solute transport processes are affected by soil pore water velocity distribution. pore size distribution, which can be used to infer pore water velocity distribution, can be estimated from a soil water retention curve (n). in this study, a solute breakthrough curve was simulated using soil hydraulic parameters in four different soils. to evaluate the proposed model, predictions were compared to...

soil temperature is one of the most effective parameters for plant growth. although the spatiotemporal monitoring of soil temperature is important for providing an optimum condition to maximize the yield efficiency, indirect measurements for zoning  of soil temperature are essential due to difficulties in direct methods of measuring it and also the limited measurement points. thus, the efficien...

Skidding operations induce changes in soil physical properties, which have the potential to impact soil sustainability and forest productivity. Our objective was to investigate the effects of traffic frequency, trail slope, and soil moisture content on soil compaction, total porosity and rut depth. Treatments included a combination of three different traffic intensities (3, 7, and 14 passes), t...

In this study, two techniques for spatio-temporal (ST) kriging of soil water content are compared. The first technique, spatio-temporal ordinary kriging, is the simplest of the two, and uses only information about soil water content. The second technique, spatio-temporal kriging with external drift, uses also the relationship between soil water content and net-precipitation to aid the interpola...

The objective of this work was to investigate the relationship between soil water content and rainfall with rice, beans, cassava and corn yields in the semiarid region of Northeast Brazil. Precipitation and modeled soil water content were compared to yields recorded at the county levels in this region. The results were also integrated over the area of the nine States that lie within the officia...