Soil microbial properties are known to exhibit high spatial and temporal variability, which can hinder our understanding of the effects of agricultural management on soil microbial activities, populations and communities. However, if this variability is explicitly considered in soil sampling schemes, experimental results can help us better understand soil microbial properties. In this initial a...

Copyright: © 2014 Xiong Li, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Soils are known to be “skin of the earth” and carry the material basis for human beings. As one of the basic disciplines of ag...

Spatial patterns in mercury cycling and bioaccumulation at the landscape level in the Everglades were investigated by collecting and analyzing multimedia samples for mercury species and biogeochemical characteristics from 228 randomly located stations. Higher total mercury (THg) in environmental compartments (surface water, soil, flocculent detrital material (floc), and periphyton) generally oc...

Developing soil sensors with the possibility of continuous online measurement is a major challenge in soil science. Terahertz (THz) electromagnetic radiation may provide the opportunity for the measurement of organic material density, water content and other soil parameters at different soil depths. Penetration depth and information content is important for a functional soil sensor. Therefore, ...

A classical transport experiment was performed in a field plot of 2.5 m2 using the dye tracer brilliant blue. The measured tracer distribution demonstrates the dominant role of the heterogeneous soil structure for solute transport. As with many other published experiments, this evidences the need of considering the macroscopic structure of soil to predict flow and transport. We combine three di...

Soil is a mixture of four components: air, free water, bound water and soil particles. The microwave dielectric constant of soil is strongly dependent on the soil moisture content. The dielectric constant is a measure of the response of a material to an applied electric field, such as an electromagnetic wave. It has a real and an imaginary component. Soil particles’ dielectric constant depends ...

Water plays a crucial role in soil organic matter (SOM) having various different functions such as transport of material, elution of ,e. g., pollutants in soil, and also the sequestration of humic substances. Furthermore, the generation and quantification of hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions in soil has several effects on SOM which can also include the storage amount and time of certain mater...

for optimum planning, utilization, and management of lands, recognition of spatial variability of soil properties is necessary. this research was conducted to evaluate spatial variability of soil properties in 5000 ha of arsenjan plain in fars province. for this purpose, soil salinity, ph, particle size percentage, sodium, potassium, and organic carbon (oc) were measured on a systematic squared...

Elevated atmospheric CO2 may alter decomposition rates through changes in plant material quality and through its impact on soil microbial activity. This study examines whether plant material produced under elevated CO2 decomposes differently from plant material produced under ambient CO2. Moreover, a long-term experiment offered a unique opportunity to evaluate assumptions about C cycling under...

An enormous amount of dredged soils was generated from Malaysian rivers, lakes and seas. These dredged soils have poor geotechnical properties and are generally classified as “useless materials” [1]. However dredged soils can be recycled and reused as a potentially useful geo-material by solidification. This paper presents the study exploring the reuse potential of Malaysian dredged marine soil...