Currently, remote sensing techniques provide the most feasible capability to monitor soil moisture over a range of space and time scales, such as passive microwave radiometric measurements in the 1-5 GHz range. It is found that variations in the brightness temperature are related most closely to the moisture content in a shallow near surface region, even if the actual sensing depth depends on t...

The no-tillage system is perceived as having lower soil temperatures, wetter soil conditions, and greater surface penetration resistance compared with conventional and other conservation tillage systems. Concerns associated with the effect of the no-tillage system on certain soil physical properties (i.e. soil temperature, moisture, and compaction) prompted this study to evaluate the effect of ...

The biogeographical distribution of soil bacterial communities has been widely investigated. However, there has been little study of the biogeography of soil archaeal communities on a regional scale. Here, using high-throughput sequencing, we characterized the archaeal communities of 94 soil samples across the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Thaumarchaeota was the predominant archael phylum in all the...

Soil moisture is the key variable in the hydrological cycle. In the Volta Basin, West Africa, where rainfed agriculture forms the main source of income for the majority of the population; productivity relies on available soil moisture or “green water”. Progress will depend on good management of green water, and will be strongly based on monitoring results. Data scarcity in the Volta Basin empha...

Active microwave remote sensing observations of backscattering, such as C-band vertically polarized synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observations from the second European remote sensing (ERS-2) satellite, have the potential to measure moisture content in a near-surface layer of soil. However, SAR backscattering observations are highly dependent on topography, soil texture, surface roughness and s...

for a determination of soil characteristics one should have access to instruments that can measure these characteristics, including: soil penetration resistance with high accuracy. one of the accurate instruments commonly employed in soil penetration determinations is cone penetrometer. this apparatus, by measuring soil cone index at different soil depths can provide useful about information ab...

Abstract This paper presents a quantitative account of vegetation–environmental factor relationships in arid rangelands. Vegetation cover was recorded using Braun-Blanquet combined abundance-cover scale in each quadrat. Within each quadrat, one profile was dug and soil samples being taken at 0-20cm and 20-100cm depths. Under study physical-chemical characteristics included texture, lime, orga...