Plant and soil properties cooperatively structure soil microbial communities, with implications for ecosystem functioning. However, the extent to which each factor contributes to community structuring is not fully understood. To quantify the influence of plants and soil properties on microbial diversity and composition in an agricultural context, we conducted an experiment within a corn-based a...

Comparative studies have usually shown higher yields in conventional cropping systems (CCS) than in organic cropping systems (OCS). By utilizing a long-term field experiment on silt soil with 18 years of cropping history (1982–1999), including three OCSs and one CCS, we studied if this is true also for strawberry. The strawberry experiment was conducted in 2000–2002. The experiment had one CCS ...

One of the principal aims of alternative cropping systems is to minimize excessive loss of N while maximizing N use efficiency and meeting crop N requirements. Many such cropping systems substitute intensive application of synthetic fertilizer with organic inputs, such as N2-fixing legumes. The effectiveness of legume residues as a N source for subsequent crops depends heavily on temporal N rel...

Grass cropping in the rotation and the use of no-till seeding appear to be important components for developing sustainable cropping systems. Grass cropping and no-till seeding improve soil organic matter content, increase the soil microbial biomass, increase earthworm numbers, likely cause a buildup of fungivorous microarthropods and nematodes, and greatly increases the resistance of soil to er...

Image cropping is a technique that is used to select the most relevant areas of an image, discarding the useless ones. Handmade selection, especially in case of large photo collections, is a time consuming task. Automatic image cropping techniques may help users, suggesting to them which part of the image is the most relevant, according to specific criteria. We suppose that the most visually sa...

corn–soybean cropping systems predominate. The effect of these cropping systems on indicators of soil quality Understanding long-term management effects on soil properties is only partially understood. Soil organic C has been is necessary to determine the relative sustainability of cropping systems. Soil physical, chemical, and biological properties were measured shown to increase in monocultur...

Despite a large scale government investment to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers, rural poverty remains widespread in Nigeria. However, technical efficiency effects on transitory have not received much attention literature Nigeria due lack nationally representative panel data that can track status households over time. Using two-wave between 2010 and 2015, socioeconomic dynamics ca...

Surveys were conducted in Alexandria, El-Behera, and Matrouh Governorates in northwestern Egypt during the 1994-1998 cropping seasons to study the occurrence, population density, host associations, and distribution of phytoparasitic nematodes associated with 35 major crops, grasses, and weeds. A total of 220 soil and root samples containing mixed populations of 26 genera and 38 species of phyto...