ABSTRACT Soil fertility amendments, including composted cotton-gin trash, swine manure, a rye-vetch green manure, or synthetic fertilizers, were applied to subplots and tillage on bare soil; or tillage followed by surface mulch with wheat straw were applied to main plots to determine the effect on the incidence of southern blight caused by Sclerotium rolfsii, yield of processing tomato, and soi...

We propose a polarimetric two-scale surface scattering model employed to retrieve the surface parameters of bare soils from polarimetric SAR data. The scattering surface is here considered as composed of slightly rough randomly tilted facets, for which the Small Perturbation Method holds. The facet random tilt causes a random variation of the local incidence angle, and a random rotation of the ...

Soil properties are well known to affect vegetation, but the role of soil heterogeneity in the patterning of vegetation dynamics is poorly documented. We asked whether the location of an ecotone separating grass-dominated and sparsely vegetated areas reflected only historical variation in degradation or was related to variation in inherent soil properties. We then asked whether changes in the c...

Plants have an important impact on soil microbial communities and their functions. However, how plants determine the microbial composition and network interactions is still poorly understood. During a four-year field experiment, we investigated the functional gene composition of three types of soils (Phaeozem, Cambisols and Acrisol) under maize planting and bare fallow regimes located in cold t...

Over the last decades, understanding of the effects of plants on soil microbiomes has greatly advanced. However, knowledge on the assembly of rhizospheric communities in aged-contaminated industrial soils is still limited, especially with regard to transcriptionally active microbiomes and their link to the quality or quantity of carbon sources. We compared the short-term (2-10 days) dynamics of...

Mountainous regions are especially vulnerable to climate and land use change. For a monitoring of subtle changes detailed and continuous land cover information is necessary. Therefore vegetation cover fractions are derived for the Naryn river catchment in Kyrgyzstan using a remote sensing multi-scale approach. First a very high resolution QuickBird image is classified into discrete classes usin...