[1] Texas experienced the most extreme one-year drought on record in 2011 with precipitation at 40% of long-term mean and agricultural losses of ~$7.6 billion. We assess the value of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite-derived total water storage (TWS) change as an alternative remote sensing-based drought indicator, independent of traditional drought indicators based on in...

A critical step in the quantification of soil quality (SQ) is the selection of SQ benchmarks. The benchmarks used in this study were SQ ratings made by 32 farmer collaborators representing a range of farming systems, scales of operation and geographic locations in the Mid-Atlantic region of USA. Soils from 45 pairs of sites identified by their farmers as having good and poor SQ were sampled ove...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration with enhanced stable carbon storage has been widely accepted as a very important ecosystem property. Yet, the link between carbon stability and bio-activity for ecosystem functioning with OC accumulation in field soils has not been characterized. We assessed the changes in microbial activity versus carbon stability along a paddy soil chronosequence shifti...

On 60 m2 hillslope plots, at 18 mainly grassland locations in Switzerland rain was applied at rates of 50– 100 mm/h for between 3 and 6 h. The generated flows were measured, including overland flow, near surface and subsurface flow 0.5–1.3 m below the surface. At some locations less than 2% of the rain flowed down the slope either on or below the surface, whereas at some others more than 90% of...

Large-scale vegetation restoration in China’s Loess Plateau has been initiated by the central government for controlling soil andwater losses in the past three decades. However, there is virtually no guidance for plant species selection for the restoration purpose. We investigated the effects of planting trees and shrubs, land-use conversions from croplands to pastures and native grasslands on ...

In Northwestern China, the carbon fixing capacity of black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) has been questioned because of its slow growth following the return of unproductive farmland to forest. To explore the effects of stand age on the carbon sequestration potential of R. pseudoacacia in a semi-arid, ecologically fragile area, parameters related to carbon fixation were investigated in plots of ...

Water movement and storage within an agricultural watershed can be simulated at different spatial resolutions of land areas or hydrological response units (HRUs). Interactions between HRUs in space and time vary with the HRU sizes, such that natural scaling relationships are confounded with the simulation scales. Scaling concepts can be tested using the AgroEcoSystemWatershed (AgES-W) model wit...

Soil degradation has been associated with a lack of adequate consideration of soil ecosystem services. We demonstrate a broadly applicable method for mapping changes in the supply of two priority soil ecosystem services to support decisions about sustainable land-use configurations. We used a landscape-scale study area of 302 km(2) in northern Victoria, south-eastern Australia, which has been c...

Land use intensity is an important indicator of human activities, so we quantified the land use intensity and five ecosystem services (soil conservation, water conservation, carbon storage, net primary productivity (NPP), and crop production) in 13 subbasins of the Tabu River Basin in an agro-pastoral ecotone in central Inner Mongolia. Furthermore, we analyzed the relationships among ecosystem ...