Characterization of soil water content (SWC) profiles at catchment scale has profound implications for understanding hydrological processes of the terrestrial water cycle, thereby contributing to sustainable water management and ecological restoration in arid and semi-arid regions. This study described the vertical profiles of SWC at the small catchment scale on the hilly and gully Loess Platea...

Soil fungal community structures are often highly heterogeneous even among samples taken from small field plots. Sample pooling is widely used in order to overcome this heterogeneity, however, no objective criteria have yet been defined on how to determine the number of samples to be pooled for representatively profiling a field plot. In the present study PCR/RFLP and T-RFLP analysis of fungal ...

Proximal sensing of soil electromagnetic properties is widely used to map spatial land heterogeneity. The mapping instruments use galvanic contact, capacitive coupling or electromagnetic induction. Regardless of the type of instrument, the geometrical configuration between signal transmitting and receiving elements typically defines the shape of the depth response function. To assess vertical s...

This paper summarizes three mathematical models used to describe how contaminant concentration profiles in soil may be inferred from the intensities of neutron-induced capture-gamma photon intensities measured at the soil surface. In particular, the linear regularization, linear regularization with an iterative positivity constraint, and the Backus-Gilbert methods are applied to the soil contam...

Winter wheat is threatened by drought in the Huang-Huai-Hai Plain of China, thus, effective water-saving irrigation practices are urgently required to maintain its high winter wheat production. This study was conducted from 2012 to 2014 to determine how supplemental irrigation (SI) affected soil moisture, photosynthesis, and dry matter (DM) production of winter wheat by measuring the moisture i...

Groundwater is the main water resource for plant growth and development in the saline soil of the Yellow River Delta in China. To investigate the variabilities and distributions of soil water and salt contents at various groundwater level (GL), soil columns with planting Tamarix chinensis Lour were established at six different GL. The results demonstrated the following: With increasing GL, the ...

The description of soil microbial community structure by phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) profiles is based on the relationship between the phylogeny of microorganisms and their PLFA profiles. Based on this relationship, two community based microbiological measurements, namely, potential C source utilization patterns in Biolog microtiter plates and PLFA profiles were used to examine metabolic fin...

This paper examines the effects of soil moisture initialization in a coupled air quality–meteorological model on temperature profiles, wind speeds, and pollutant concentrations. Three simulations, each with different initial soil moisture fields, were run. In the baseline simulation, predicted temperatures, wind speeds, and gas/aerosol pollutant concentrations accurately matched observations. I...

Nitrate (NO3) profiles in semiarid unsaturated zones archive land use change (LUC) impacts on nitrogen (N) cycling with implications for agricultural N management and groundwater quality. This study quantified LUC impacts on NO3 inventories and fluxes by measuring NO3 profiles beneath natural and rainfed (nonirrigated) agricultural ecosystems in the southern High Plains (SHP). Inventories of NO...