Soil erosion has been recognized as one of the major threats to our environment and water quality worldwide, especially in China. To mitigate nonpoint source water quality problems caused by soil erosion, best management practices (BMPs) and/or conservation programs have been adopted. Watershed models, such as the Annualized Agricultural Non-Point Source Pollutant Loading model (AnnAGNPS), have...

Microbial traits related to ecological responses and functions could provide a common currency facilitating synthesis and prediction; however, such traits are difficult to measure directly for all taxa in environmental samples. Past efforts to estimate trait values based on phylogenetic relationships have not always distinguished between traits with high and low phylogenetic conservatism, limit...

Root exudation is increasingly being recognized as an important driver of ecosystem processes; however, few studies have examined the degree to which variations in exudate stoichiometry and soil resources affect microbial controls of nutrient availability and decomposition. We added root exudate mimics of varying chemical quality to soils collected from two adjacent forest stands (one a 70 year...

abstract microbial contaminants transport to groundwater is a serious environmental problem that can result in large outbreaks of waterborne diseases. some of bacteria can travel from vadose zone and cause contamination of groundwater resources. thus, an accurate prediction of transport and fate of pathogenic microorganisms in unsaturated soil is needed to protect groundwater resources. the mai...

Background Soil microbial communities (SMC) play a central role in the structure and function of desert ecosystems. However, the high variability of annual precipitation could results in the alteration of SMC and related biological processes depending on soil water potential. The nature of the physiological adjustments made by SMC in order to obtain energy and nutrients remains unclear under di...

The emergy evaluation of the Ladakh socio-economic system and traditional agriculture is presented. Ladakh is a region of West Himalaya (State of Jammu and Kashmir, northern India), geographically classified as “high cold desert” (altitude ranging from 2300 m to 7672 m a.s.l.), located among the Karakoram Range, the Himalayan Range and the Tibetan Plateau. The region is poor in natural resource...

The aim of these experiments was to apply magnesium (50 and 100 mg Mg kg soil) to neutralise the potentially negative effects of soil contamination by cadmium (10, 20, 30 and 40 mg Cd kg soil) on the number of some groups of microorganisms. Another objective was to determine the relationship between the number of these microorganisms relative to yield of yellow lupine and some physicochemical p...

The word organic, applied to fertilizers, indicates that the nutrients are derived from the remains or by‐products of a once‐living organism. Farmers are continually searching for alternatives to synthetic inorganic fertilizers to alleviate the escalating production costs associated with the increasing costs of energy and fertilizers and the problems of soil and surface water deterioration asso...