Sulfonamide antibiotics are a commonly used group of compounds in animal husbandry. They are excreted with manure, which is collected in a storage lagoon in certain types of confined animal feeding operations. Flood irrigation of forage fields with this liquid manure creates the potential risk of groundwater contamination in areas with shallow groundwater levels. We tested the hypothesis that-i...

Biochar land application can potentially be used for carbon sequestration, improving soil quality, and reducing non-point source pollution. Understanding biochar mobility is important because its transport in soil greatly influences its stability, the dynamics of soil microbial communities and organic matter, and the movement of biochar-associated contaminants. Here, the transport of biochar pa...

Surface characteristics of soils are one of the main factors controlling processes at the soil-water interface like wetting, sorption or dissolution processes and, thereby, have a high impact on natural soil functions like habitat, filter, buffer, storage and transformation functions. Since surface characteristics, like wettability or repellency, are not static soil properties but continuously ...

Soil pH is a strong regulator for activity as well as for size and composition of denitrifier communities. Low pH not only lowers overall denitrification rates but also influences denitrification kinetics and gaseous product stoichiometry. N2O reductase is particularly sensitive to low pH which seems to impair its activity post-transcriptionally, leading to higher net N2O production. Little is ...

The mobility of fluorescein and bromide used as tracers in packed soil columns was investigated. Five different soils were used in two application methods: soil surface application and soil incorporation, both of which simulate accepted methods of soil application of termiticides to prevent structural infestation. The breakthrough of bromide and fluorescein in column eluates were measured. The ...

BACKGROUND Natural forest succession often affects soil physical and chemical properties. Selected physical and chemical soil properties were studied in an old-growth forest across a forest successional series in Dinghushan Nature Reserve, Southern China. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS The aim was to assess the effects of forest succession change on soil properties. Soil samples (0-20 cm dept...

Different machine learning algorithms were assessed for estimating five functional soil parameters (SOC content, Calcium content, Phosphorous content, sand content, and pH value). The algorithms used include variants of linear regression and support vector regression. A closer look at the prediction performance for each target revealed that apart from pH, which consistently had worse performanc...

BACKGROUND This systematic analysis was conducted to investigate pathological diagnosis of vertebral tumor metastasis with unknown primaries. METHODS Clinical studies conducted to pathologically investigate vertebral tumor metastasis were identified using a predefined search strategy. Pooled diagnosis (PD) of each pathological confirmation was calculated. RESULTS For vertebral tumor metasta...

Nitrate was formed from ammonium at pH 3.2 to 6.1 in suspensions of a naturally acid forest soil; the maximum rates of formation occurred at ca. pH 4 to 5. Nitrate was also formed from soil nitrogen in suspensions incubated at 50 degrees C. Autotrophic nitrifying bacteria could not be isolated from this soil. Enrichment cultures produced nitrate in a medium with beta-alanine if much soil was ad...