Vegetation deterioration and soil loss are the main causes of more precipitation leakages and surface water shortages in degraded karst areas. In order to improve the utilization of water resources in such regions, water storage engineering has been considered; however, site selection and cost associated with the special karstic geological structure have made this difficult. According to the pr...

Limited availability of freshwater and increasing demand for food require careful management of available resources. However, information on water utilization within river basins is often inadequate for comprehensive water management. Therefore, researchers are developing new tools and methodologies to overcome these data problems. A major concern for land use planning is the identification of ...

Interaction between microbial community and invading Escherichia 1 coli O157:H7 in soils from vegetable fields 2 Zhiyuan Yao, Haizhen Wang # , Laosheng Wu, Jianjun Wu, Philip C Brookes, Jianming 3 Xu # 4 5 Institute of Soil and Water Resources and Environmental Science, Zhejiang Provincial Key 6 Laboratory of Subtropical Soil and Plant Nutrition, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China 7 8 ...

Our understanding of the effects of elevated atmospheric CO2, singly and in combination with other environmental changes,on plant-soil interactions is incomplete. Elevated CO2 effects on C4 plants, though smaller than on C3 species, are mediated mostly via decreased stomatal conductance and thus water loss. Therefore, we characterized the interactive effect of elevated CO2 and drought on soil m...

Soil health, along with water supply, is the most valuable resource for humans, as human life depends on the soil’s generosity. Soil degradation, therefore, poses a threat to food security, as it reduces yield, forces farmers to use more inputs, and may eventually lead to soil abandonment. Unfortunately, the importance of preserving soil health appears to be overlooked by policy makers. In this...

Ecologically based farming conserves and improves the soil resource and protects environmental quality by using organic or natural resources without the application of synthetic chemicals. Soil quality assessment indicates the ability of management systems to optimize soil productivity and to maintain its structural and biological integrity. Our objective was to evaluate the effect of ecologica...

This document proposes changes to the World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB) to better acommodate soils dominated by technic material. It is the second draft, aiming at the revision of the WRB to be submitted at the 2006 International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS) meetings. Three new definitions are proposed: – Artifacts are defined as solid or liquid material created by humans as part o...