Cultivating sandy soil is a promising solution to overcome the fight against hunger especially in the developing countries. The main problems of sandy soil are moisture holding capacity and nutrients deficiency. A containers experiment was carried out to study the enhancement of water productivity and crop yield of sandy soils treated with clay. The container size was 31 x 15 x 60 cm with one t...

We investigated hydraulic constraints on water uptake by velvet mesquite (Prosopis velutina Woot.) at a site with sandy-loam soil and at a site with loamy-clay soil in southeastern Arizona, USA. We predicted that trees on sandy-loam soil have less negative xylem and soil water potentials during drought and a lower resistance to xylem cavitation, and reach E(crit) (the maximum steady-state trans...

Factors that may account for subarctic vegetation patterns that are not reconcilable with synoptic climate were sought by reference to data on local climate, soils, parent materials, vegetation, and topography. Where the forest-tundra lies climatically northward, the vegetation transition zone is relatively narrow, and the soils are nutrient-rich, fine-textured loamy Cryosols derived from sedim...

Wind erosion and dust storms are main issues in arid and semi-arid regions. Application of soil stabilizer on unstable land might be an eff ective and sustainable strategy in arid and semi-arid countries to minimized harmful eff ects on environment and human health. Th e aim of this study was to assess the eff ect of using nanoclay for increasing soil stability, as a result of increasing in siz...

A leaching experiment using a mixture of five REE oxides and gravelly, sandy loam soils was conducted to examine the applicability of the REE oxides as a sediment tracer for coarse-textured soils. The experiment showed little leaching of the oxides and an enrichment of various size classes of soil particles with the oxides, which reflected the strong binding capability of the REE oxides with th...

Natural attenuation of petroleum hydrocarbons in polar and subpolar soils is limited by low nutrients, low temperatures, and water availability. This study investigated three sites contaminated with diesel fuel and the use of aeration to remediate one of the sites at sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island. These sites were of differing ages and had different soil–water regimes. The most recent spill (N...

Much of the row crop production agriculture in the Midwest occurs on soils developed from glacial till, but little research has addressed herbicide biodegradation in subsurface till. This study investigated the ability of indigenous microorganisms to mineralize the herbicide 2,4-D (2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) at sites in Iowa and Indiana. Microorganisms were able to mineralize 2,4-D, with r...

Microbial community diversity and heterogeneity in saturated and unsaturated subsurface soils from Abbott's Pit in Virginia (1.57, 3.25, and 4.05 m below surface) and Dover Air Force Base in Delaware (6.00 and 7.50 m below surface) were analyzed using a culture-independent small-subunit (SSU) rRNA gene (rDNA)-based cloning approach. Four to six dominant operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were i...

Silver (Ag) and thallium (Tl) are nonessential elements that can be highly toxic to a number of biota even when present in the environment at trace levels. In spite of that, the literature on the chemistry and fate of Ag and Tl in soils is extremely scanty. In that context, the key objective of this research was to compare the sorption characteristics of trace amounts of Ag and Tl on a range of...