American chestnut trees once dominated vast areas of deciduous forest in eastern North America, but the exotic chestnut blight almost eliminated the species from the region. Introduction of blight-resistant American chestnut hybrids will probably start in the next decade after many years of tree breeding. What were the historic effects of chestnut on forest soils, and what changes may follow re...

Soil bacterial communities play an important role in nutrient recycling and storage in terrestrial ecosystems. Loess soils are one of the most important soil resources for maintaining the stability of vegetation ecosystems and are mainly distributed in northwest China. Estimating the distributions and affecting factors of soil bacterial communities associated with various types of vegetation wi...

Species utilizing a wide range of resources are intuitively expected to be less efficient in exploiting each resource type compared to species which have developed an optimal phenotype for utilizing only one or a few resources. We report here the results of an empirical study whose aim was to test for a negative association between habitat niche breadth and foraging performance. As a model syst...

Although people have always classified soils, it is only since themid 19th century that soil classification emerged as an important topic within soil science. It forced soil scientists to think systematically about soils and its genesis and developed to facilitate communication between soil scientists. It has also been the cause for much debate and confusion but two internationally accepted sys...

Relationships between soils and their position in the landscape have been well established in most parts of the world. Such relationships are useful when mapping soils and geographically identifying soil classes based on a set of diagnostic soil characteristics and horizons. Human infl uence may alter the pattern, and here we report on a series of soilscapes in Wisconsin, USA that have been str...

Conservation tillage is commonly used in regions affected by water and wind erosion. To understand the effects of conservation tillage on soil nutrients and yield, a long-term experiment was set up in a region affected by water and wind erosion on the Loess Plateau. The treatments used were traditional tillage (CK), no tillage (NT), straw mulching (SM), plastic-film mulching (PM), ridging and p...

of the Thesis Evaluation of Ar-Ar ages of Individual Mica Grains for Provenance Studies of Loess, Long Island, NY by Jian Zhong Master of Science in Geosciences State University of New York at Stony Brook 2001 Loess in a one-meter thick section on the SUNY Stony Brook Campus has been studied for grain size distribution and provenance. The loess provenance has been evaluated using single crystal...

The increasing demand for improved irrigation systems in the world requires a more comprehensive and widespread study of reliability safety hydraulic structures. In this regard, during operation structures systems, especially on collapsible soils, is very important because loess subsidence soils are globally, significant part rocks also found Central Asia, including Republic Uzbekistan. This ar...