Seepage zones have been shown to be of critical importance in controlling contaminant export from agricultural watersheds. To date, no multipurpose agricultural water quality model has seepage zones incorporated into its process-level representations. We chose to test two widely used models of agricultural water quality, the Groundwater Loading Effects of Agricultural Management Systems (GLEAMS...

Several arthropods are known to be highly beneficial to agricultural production. Consequently it is of great relevance to study the importance of land management and land composition for the conservation of beneficial aphid-predator arthropod species in agricultural areas. Therefore our study focusing on the beneficial arthropod Bembidion lampros had two main purposes: I) identifying the physic...

BACKGROUND Understanding the behavior of birds in agricultural habitats can be the first step in evaluating the conservation implications of birds' use of landscapes shaped by modern agriculture. The existence and magnitude of risk from agricultural practices and the quality of resources agricultural lands provide will be determined largely by how birds use these habitats. Buff-breasted Sandpip...

Planned flooding of agricultural fields is performed to prevent erosion (e.g. sheet, gully, and rill) and provide habitat for waterfowl. As a post-harvest field treatment, flooding is becoming more common in the agriculturally dominated landscape of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley (MAV) in the southeastern United States. Despite this trend, information pertaining to water quality characteristic...

Waterfowl frequently acquire high-energy agricultural seeds in harvested and unharvested croplands during migration and winter. Estimates of agricultural seed biomass in harvested and unharvested corn, soybean, and grain sorghum fields do not exist or are outdated for the southeastern United States. Therefore, we estimated seed biomass in 105 harvested and 59 unharvested corn, soybean, and grai...

Weed communities in agronomic fields are dominated by annual species. Summer annuals initiate growth each spring from seeds found in the upper soil profile (Figure 1). In most fields, a small percentage of the emerging plants survive and contribute new seeds to the soil seedbank. Historically, most research of the annual weed life cycle has focused on seed dormancy and emergence (A), effect of ...

In recent years, agriculture has become the prime polluter of natural resources. It is therefore essential to make assessments based on reliable indicators to ensure that an agricultural system remains not only productive, but also ecologically sound. A large area of arable land in Guilan province is devoted to rice cultivation so the transition to environmentally sound agricultural practice in...

In order to improve biological control of agricultural pests, it is fundamental to understand which factors influence the composition of natural enemies in agricultural landscapes. In this study, we aimed to understand how agricultural land use affects a number of different traits in ground beetle communities to better predict potential consequences of land-use change for ecosystem functioning....

Irregularly disturbed forests surrounding crop fields in agricultural landscapes often serve as ecological buffers that separate undesirable agricultural elements such as agrichemicals and weedy species from adjacent ecosystems. However, the nature of this interface between fields and forests remains little studied, particularly within the context of how species composition changes with field d...