Stable carbon isotopic analyses of organic carbon (d13C) in individual paleosol profiles from Permian–Triassic sequences of Antarctica reveal systematic isotopic variations with profile depth. These variations are in many cases analogous to those in modern soils, which are functions of redox conditions, soil development, and degree and type of microbial decay. In modern soils, these isotopic de...

To understand the response of soil bacteria to the surrounding environment, it is necessary to examine the gene expression profiles of the bacteria in the soil. For this purpose, we developed a new method of extracting RNA from soil reproducibly. Using this new method, we extracted RNA from a field soil, which was sterilized and inoculated with Rhodococcus sp. strain RHA1, a biphenyl degrader i...

some. Stermitz et al. (1999) found SSURGO data to be of little value in explaining yield variations. In more Managing soil variability is an integral aspect of precision agriculgeneral terms, the National Research Council (1997) ture (PA). Existing soil databases, however, are found to match few of the requirements for PA. The nature of these requirements and concluded that “current soil survey...

Vertical soil moisture profiles based on the principle of maximum entropy (POME) were validated using field and model data and applied to guide an irrigation cycle over a maize field in north central Alabama (USA). The results demonstrate that a simple two-constraint entropy model under the assumption of a uniform initial soil moisture distribution can simulate most soil moisture profiles that ...

Many studies have evaluated the effects of biochar application on soil structure and plant growth. However, there are very few studies describing the effect of biochar on native soil microbial communities. Microbial analysis of environmental samples requires accurate and reproducible methods for the extraction of DNA from samples. Because of the variety among microbial species and the strong ad...

Atrazine, a herbicide widely used in corn production, is frequently detected as pesticide in water resources. In this research, four agricultural fields with a long history of atrazine application in Shiraz and its vicinity in Fars province of Iran, have been studied to determine the fate of atrazine through the passage of time. These four farms were cultivated under a crop rotation (corn-wheat...

Soil microbes are major drivers of soil carbon cycling, yet we lack an understanding of how climate warming will affect microbial communities. Three ongoing field studies at the Harvard Forest Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) site (Petersham, MA) have warmed soils 5°C above ambient temperatures for 5, 8, and 20 years. We used this chronosequence to test the hypothesis that soil microbial co...

Remote sensing provides a capability to make frequent and spatially distributed measurements of surface soil moisture, whilst recent advances in affordable Time Domain Reflectometry probes allow continuous monitoring of profile soil moisture at specific points. We believe that reliable estimation of the spatial and temporal variation of profile soil moisture on a routine basis will require a co...

Study of soil properties like field capacity (F.C) and permanent wilting point (P.W.P) plays important roles in study of soil moisture retention curve. Pedotransfer functions (PTFs) provide an alternative by estimating soil parameters from more readily available soil data. In this study, a new approach is proposed as a modification to a standard fuzzy modeling method based on the table look-up ...