A clear understanding of the impacts of forest practices on long-term soil productivity is required to maintain the productivity of forest soils while forests continue to be managed for timber production. Although current regulations governing soil conservation in British Columbia are partially based on historic and ongoing research, there are few clear and unambiguous long-term results. The ne...

Maintenance and improvement of soil quality in continuous cropping systems is critical to sustaining agricultural productivity and environmental quality for future generations. This review focuses on lessons learned from long-term continuous cropping experiments. Soil organic carbon (SOC) is the most often reported attribute from long-term studies and is chosen as the most important indicator o...

Intensive forestry has resulted in considerable increases in aboveground stand productivity including foliar and belowground biomass which are the primary sources of soil organic matter. Soil organic matter is important for the maintenance of soil physical, chemical and biological quality. Additionally, sequestering carbon (C) in soils may provide a means of mitigating increasing atmospheric ca...

Geneticists and breeders are positioned to breed plants with root traits that improve productivity under drought. However, a better understanding of root functional traits and how traits are related to whole plant strategies to increase crop productivity under different drought conditions is needed. Root traits associated with maintaining plant productivity under drought include small fine root...

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...

Soil microbial diversity is an important index of agricultural productivity (Nimisha Sharma et al,.2010; Kent and Triplett, 2002; Isik, 2008). Both plant and the soil types influences the microbial diversity. Rhizosphere microbial diversity usually influenced by both plant and soil types. Plants and microorganisms interact with each other and co evaluate together. Their balance is important for...

this research was conducted in a part of the dry farming lands of the southern guilan province, aimed at examining the impact of tillage erosion on the soil displacement and consequently its productivity. in order to achieve the research aims, 18 sampling points were spotted in some different locations of the landscape in seven adjacent fields, based on the adjacency to the field ridges (border...

Land use intensification is associated with loss of biodiversity and altered ecosystem functioning. Until now most studies on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning focused on random loss of species, while loss of rare species that usually are the first to disappear received less attention. Here we test if the effect of rare microbial species loss on plant productivity ...

Carbon storage by many terrestrial ecosystems can be limited by nutrients, predominantly nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), in addition to other environmental constraints, water, light and temperature. However the spatial distribution and the extent of both N and P limitation at the global scale have not been quantified. Here we have developed a global model of carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosph...

Phosphorus (P) is a critical nutrient used to maximize plant growth and yield. Current agriculture management practices commonly experience low plant P use efficiency due to natural chemical sorption and transformations when P fertilizer is applied to soils. A perplexing challenge facing agriculture production is finding sustainable solutions to deliver P more efficiently to plants. Using presc...