Abstract Medicago L. (Fabaceae; Papillionoidae) has high nutritive value, palatability, and ability to improve the soil fertility which puts it as one of world’s most important forages. genetic resources are suffering from anthropogenic destructions, overgrazing, climate change drought. Using results a previous gap analysis, prioritized species sites for in situ ex conservation, this study aims...

Maintaining crop production to feed a growing world population is a major challenge for this period of rapid global climate change. No consistent conceptual or experimental framework for crop plants integrates information at the levels of genome regulation, metabolism, physiology and response to growing environment. An important role for plasticity in plants is assisting in homeostasis in respo...

Soil microbial communities maintain many ecosystem functions including decomposition and symbiotic nutrient uptake. Prior field studies have focused on either geospatial or relatively large-time scale trends in these communities. Whereas, their small-time (e.g., weekly) dynamics agricultural fields largely been overlooked. Our objective was to determine the effects characteristics of short-time...

A hydroclimatology, or description of long-term means and interannual variation, that focuses on soil moisture deficits was constructed for the period of 1895–1998 for a six-state region composing the Ohio Valley. The term ‘‘deficit’’ is considered from an agricultural point of view whereby moisture-induced crop stress is a combination of insufficient precipitation and soil moisture. Of particu...