BACKGROUND A climate-controlled pot experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of planting alfalfa and applying organic fertilizer on the dissipation of benzo[a]pyrene from an aged contaminated agricultural soil. RESULTS Short-term planting of alfalfa inhibited the dissipation of benzo[a]pyrene from the soil by 8.9%, and organic fertilizer enhanced benzo[a]pyrene removal from the soi...

Land surface models (LSM) are widely used as scientific and operational tools to simulate mass and energy fluxes within the soil vegetation atmosphere continuum for numerous applications in meteorology, hydrology or for geobiochemistry studies. A reliable parameterization of these models is important to improve the simulation skills. 5 Soil moisture is a key variable, linking the water and ener...

The depth and duration of snow pack is declining in the northeastern United States as a result of warming air temperatures. Since snow insulates soil, a decreased snow pack can increase the frequency of soil freezing, which has been shown to have important biogeochemical implications. One of the most notable effects of soil freezing is increased inorganic nitrogen losses from soil during the fo...

1,2-Dibromoethane (EDB), which is a groundwater contaminant in areas where it was once used as a soil fumigant, was shown to be degraded aerobically by microorganisms in two types of surface soils from an EDB-contaminated groundwater discharge area. At initial concentrations of 6 to 8 mug/liter, EDB was degraded in a few days to near or below the detection limit of 0.02 mug/liter. At 15 to 18 m...

Remediation of soils contaminated with petroleum is a challenging task. Four different bioremediation strategies, including natural attenuation, biochar amendment, phytoremediation with ryegrass, and a combination of biochar and ryegrass, were investigated with greenhouse pot experiments over a 90-day period. The results showed that planting ryegrass in soil can significantly improve the remova...

Land surface albedo is a significant parameter for maintaining a balance in surface energy. It is also an important parameter of bare soil surface albedo for developing land surface process models that accurately reflect diurnal variation characteristics and the mechanism behind the solar spectral radiation albedo on bare soil surfaces and for understanding the relationships between climate fac...

Of the natural processes that concentrate dispersed environmental contaminants, landscape fire stands out as having potential to rapidly concentrate contaminants and accelerate their redistribution. This study used rainfall simulation methods to quantify changes in concentration of a widely dispersed environmental contaminant (global fallout 137Cs) in soils and surface water runoff following a ...

Background & Aims of the Study: A feed forward artificial neural network (FFANN) was developed to predict the efficiency of total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) removal from a contaminated soil, using soil washing process with Tween 80. The main objective of this study was to assess the performance of developed FFANN model for the estimation of   TPH removal. Mater...