The contamination of soil with petroleum products is a major environmental problem. Petroleum products are common soil contaminants as a result of human activities, and they are causing substantial changes in the biological (particularly microbiological) processes, chemical composition, structure and physical properties of soil. The main objective of this study was to assess the impact of soil ...

Management of large volumes (60,000 ha-m) of co-production water associated with coal bed natural gas (CBNG) water extraction is a potential concern in the Powder River Basin (PRB) of Wyoming and Montana due to elevated water salinity and sodicity levels. Land application of saline-sodic CBNG water is a common water management method being practiced in the PRB, which can result in deterioration...

The unsaturated soil hydraulic properties, including soil water retention curve and hydraulic conductivity, are the crucial input parameters for simulating soil water and solute transport through the unsaturated zone at regional scales, and are expensive to measure. These properties are frequently predicted with pedotransfer functions (PTFs) using the routinely measured soil properties. 110 soi...

Identifying the vulnerability of soils to compaction damage becomes an increasingly important issue in the planning and execution of farming operations. Soil compaction models are efficient tools for predicting soil compaction due to agricultural field traffic. Most of these models require the knowledge of the stress/strain relationship, as well as the mechanical parameters and their variation ...

Soil moisture is an important hydrologic variable that controls various land surface processes. In spite of its importance to agriculture and drought monitoring, soil moisture information is not widely available on a regional scale. However, long-term soil moisture information is essential for agricultural drought monitoring and crop yield prediction. The hydrologic model Soil and Water Assessm...

Conventional water resources of good quality are scarce especially in arid and semiarid regions. The salinization of soils and water places is a substantial constraint of crop productivity. The mixed application of fresh water along with seawater is becoming a common practice by the farmers near sea sides in the developing countries. Seawaters contain beneficial nutrients that can be useful for...

The probabilistic response of depth-integrated soil water to given climatic forcing can be described readily using an existing supply-demand-storage model. An apparently complex interaction of numerous soil, climate, and plant controls can be reduced to a relatively simple expression for the equilibrium probability density function of soil water as a function of only two dimensionless parameter...

We investigated the effects of seed burial depth and soil water content on seedling emergence and growth of Ulmus pumila var. sabulosa (sandy elm), an important native tree species distributed over the European-Asian steppe. Experimental sand burial depths in the soil were 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5 cm, and soil water contents were 4%, 8%, 12% and 16% of field capacity. All two-way ANOVA (five ...

The pupal development of Aethina tumida Murray (Coleoptera: Nitidulidae) was studied at various combinations of thermo-hygrometric soil conditions (temperatures of 16, 18, and 20 C and soil water content levels of 0.37, 0.56, and 0.73 m water per cubic meter of dry soil) representative of southeastern Canada. Survivorship and development duration of A. tumida pupae, as well as sex ratio and lif...

Soil particle size distribution (PSD), one of the most important soil physical attributes, is of great importance to soil water movement, soil erosion and soil solute migration. In this study, the soil PSD of 563 soil samples from the mulched drip irrigated cotton fields in Xinjiang of China were measured by laser diffraction particle size analyzer. The soil PSD characteristics and its relation...