Libation, or the pouring of wine or blood on the ground, was an important element of religious practice in ancient Greek religion (Burkert 1985), indicating reverence for soil. Homer (c . 750 BC, Iliad 14.347) sang how ‘divine soil [χθών δı̂α] made fresh-sprung grass to grow, and dewy lotus, crocus and hyacinth’. A similar epithet ‘sacred soil’ [‘ιερòν πέδoν], which includes the root word for pe...

Commercial humic fertilizers (humates) can be used to improve carbon sequestration. In this study, a 3-year field trial (2016–2018) employed four treatments investigate the mechanism by which humate increases sequestration in fluvo-aquic soils: (1) blank: bare soil with no agricultural treatment; (2) control: standard film mulch (FM) ridge-furrow tillage (which acts as CK); (3) humate: FM plus ...

Irrigation with reclaimed water (RW) can alleviate scarcity and improve the environmental economic benefits. However, RW contains a large number of salts, suspended particles, organic matter, etc., which affect soil infiltration. Previous studies focused on examination this effect in alkaline soils, but infiltration change acidic soils has seldom been investigated. This study selects four typic...

Fertilization can affect the transformation of soil organic carbon (SOC) and microbial community composition. However, thus far, how SOC accumulation in association with bacterial is still unclear. We collected arable soils (aquic inceptisol) from a long-term fertilization experiment (20 years) including compost (CM), inorganic nitrogen + phosphorus potassium (NPK), half N plus fertilizer (HCM)...

The linkage between N2O emissions and the abundance of nitrifier and denitrifier genes is unclear in the intensively managed calcareous fluvo-aquic soils of the North China Plain. We investigated the abundance of bacterial amoA for nitrification and narG, nirS, nirK, and nosZ for denitrification by in situ soil sampling to determine how the abundance of these genes changes instantly during N fe...

Taxonomic and geographic distributions of background P concentration in soils are important when Taxonomic and geographic distributions of background P concendeciding whether a site is influenced by anthropogenic trations are important in assessing whether a soil P level is influenced by anthropogenic activities. This study was conducted to establish an input of P. Knowledge of background conce...

Abstract In seasonal flooding isolated wetlands, the degree of wetness suggests a close synergy between soil processes, landscape evolution and hydrology along space time. Until now, that subject has received insufficient attention despite natural wetlands supply essential environmental services to society are surrounded by intensive agriculture uses agrochemicals fertilizers in their managemen...

The decline in soil quality is becoming a significant process of degradation. Optimizing organic fertilizer incorporation practices cropland essential to enhancing crop productivity and health. However, that requires comprehensive understanding yield reaction across an application gradient fertilizer. We investigated the effect on yield, quality, fauna feeding activity from fluvo-aquic soils wh...