BACKGROUND Global demand for food has led to increased land-use change, particularly in dry land ecosystems, which has caused several environmental problems due to the soil degradation. In the Cuatro Cienegas Basin (CCB), alfalfa production irrigated by flooding impacts strongly on the soil. METHODS In order to analyze the effect of such agricultural land-use change on soil nutrient dynamics ...

Soil microbial communities under three agricultural management systems (conventionally tilled cropland, hayed pasture, and grazed pasture) and two fertilizer systems (inorganic fertilizer and poultry litter) were compared to that of a w150-y-old forest near Watkinsville, Georgia. Both 16S rRNA gene clone libraries and phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) analyses indicated that the structure and comp...

Alfred Hartemink is a soil scientist at ISRIC in Wageningen. Prior to his current position he was lecturer in soil science at the University of Technology in Papua New Guinea. He holds an MSc in soil science from Wageningen Agricultural University, and has worked as a soil surveyor and soil fertility specialist in Tanzania, Zaire, Indonesia, and for ICRAF in Kenya. Dr Mike Bourke is an Adjunct ...

Fungi play important and diverse roles in soil ecosystems. They act as plant pathogens, mycorrhizal symbionts and most importantly, as the principal decomposers of organic materials (Christensen, 1989; Thorn, 1997). Fungi also represent a dominant component of the soil microflora in terms of biomass (Thorn, 1997). Compared with bacterial communities, however, knowledge regarding the diversity a...

This study proposes the use of marginal abatement cost curves to calculate environmental damages of agricultural systems in China's Loess Plateau. Total system costs and revenues, management characteristics and pollution attributes are imputed into a directional output distance function, which is then used to determine shadow prices and abatement cost curves for soil and nitrogen loss. Marginal...

Heavy metal concentrations in agricultural soils of Zhejiang Province were monitored to indicate the status of heavy metal contamination and assess environmental quality of agricultural soils. A total of 908 soil samples were collected from 38 counties in Zhejiang Province and eight heavy metal (Cd, Cr, Pb, Hg, Cu, Zn, Ni and As) concentrations had been evaluated in agricultural soil. It was fo...

Soil nematodes play crucial roles in the soil food web and are a suitable indicator for assessing soil environments and ecosystems. Previous nematode community analyses based on nematode morphology classification have been shown to be useful for assessing various soil environments. Here we have conducted DNA barcode analysis for soil nematode community analyses in Japanese soils. We isolated ne...

18 The objective of this study was to relate the earthworm assemblage structure with three 19 different soil use intensities, and to indentify the physical, chemical, and 20 microbiological soil variables that are associated to the observed differences in the 21 earthworm assemblage structure between soils. Three soil uses were evaluated: 1Fifty 22 year old naturalized grasslands, low use inten...

BACKGROUND Human waste is used as an agricultural fertilizer in China and elsewhere. Because the eggs of many helminth species can survive in environmental media, reuse of untreated or partially treated human waste, commonly called night soil, may promote transmission of human helminthiases. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We conducted an open cohort study in 36 villages to evaluate the associ...

[1] Soil NOx emission from agricultural regions in the western United States has been investigated using satellite observations of NO2 from the SCIAMACHY instrument. We show that the SCIAMACHY observations over a 2 million hectare agricultural region in Montana capture the short intense NOx pulses following fertilizer application and subsequent precipitation and we demonstrate that these variat...