Harvest operations conducted under conditions of high soil moisture on a wet pine flat in South Carolina resulted in a high degree of soil surface disturbance. Less soil surface disturbance occurred when soil moisture content was lower. Soil strength varied by soil disturbance class in wet harvested locations and highly disturbed areas were associated with low soil strength and elevated levels ...

Expected changes in precipitation over large regions of the world under global climate change will have profound effects on terrestrial ecosystems in arid and semiarid regions. To explore how changes in the amount of precipitation in the growing season would affect soil nitrogen (N) availability in a semiarid ecosystem, we established rainout shelters and irrigation systems by simulating 30% re...

Data collected around the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona as part of the Cumulus Photogrammetric, In Situ and Doppler Observations (CuPIDO) experiment during the 2006 summer monsoon season are used to investigate the effect of soil moisture on the surface energy balance, boundary layer (BL) characteristics, thermally forced orographic circulations, and orographic cumulus convection. An unus...

In this study, we investigated the feasibility of using the C-band European Remote Sensing Satellite (ERS-1) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data to estimate surface soil roughness in a semiarid rangeland. Radar backscattering coefficients were extracted from a dry and a wet season SAR image and were compared with 47 in situ soil roughness measurements obtained in the rocky soils of the Walnut G...

Purpose Wet meadows formed on alluvial deposits potentially store large amounts of soil carbon (C) but its stability is subject to the impacts of management practices. The objective of this study was to quantify and characterize soil organic carbon (SOC) and nitrogen (N) in mountain wet meadows across ranges of meadow hydrology and livestock utilization. Materials and methods Eighteen wetlands ...

Soil drying and rewetting may alter the release and availability of aged pesticide residues in soils. A laboratory experiment was conducted to evaluate the influence of soil drying and wetting on the release of pesticide residues. Soil containing environmentally long-term aged (9-17 years) (14) C-labeled residues of the herbicides ethidimuron (ETD) and methabenzthiazuron (MBT) and the fungicide...

Structure is an important factor of soil functioning in ecosystems. Soil aggregate size distributions are commonly used to characterize soil structure. Relationships between density of dry soil aggregates and aggregate size present a different way to use aggregate-related information in soil structure characterization. Those relationships have been simulated assuming soils to be mass fractals. ...

Most research on boundaries between vegetation types emphasizes the contrasts and similarities between conditions on either side of a boundary, but does not compare boundary to non-boundary vegetation. That is, most previous studies lack suitable controls, and may therefore overlook underlying aspects of landscape variability at a regional scale and underestimate the effects that the vegetation...