Historically, the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) evolved under seasonally-flooded conditions that predominately supported sawgrass and other wetland vegetation. Over several thousand years, Histosol “muck” soils were deposited as organic matter accumulated above the limestone (calcium carbonate) bedrock. In the early 1900s, these soils were drained. Declining water table levels coupled with...

The recent events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, in Japan, have raised questions about the accumulation of radionuclides in soils, the transfer in the food chain, and the possibility for restricted land use in the foreseeable future. This article summarizes what is generally understood about the application of agricultural countermeasures as a land management option to reduce the...

Freshwater coastal prairie wetlands once covered large expanses of the Houston-Galveston landscape. A complex wetland matrix of mima mounds and low wetland basins known as prairie potholes provided important ecological services including habitat, lood control and water cleansing. Many of these areas were land leveled for agricultural and development purposes, erasing these features from the coa...

Many organic pollutants such as pesticides are chlorinated organics, and until recently these were thought to be purely the product of anthropogenic activities. However, some chlorinated phenolics are now known to be part of the natural chemical make up of “pristine” soils, defined as those that have not previously been directly exposed to anthropogenic inputs, except through atmospheric contam...

Freshwater coastal prairie wetlands once covered large expanses of the Houston-Galveston landscape. A complex wetland matrix of mima mounds and low wetland basins known as prairie potholes provided important ecological services including habitat, lood control and water cleansing. Many of these areas were land leveled for agricultural and development purposes, erasing these features from the coa...

Dr. Daniel G. Aldrich, Jr.— first Chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, since January 19, 1962. Responsible for developing the campus from bare ground to a fully operating institution. Dr. Aldrich joined the University of California as a junior chemist in the Citrus Experiment Station at Riverside in 1943. Following three years of service in the armed forces during World War II, h...

This study focused on the impact of land-use changes and agricultural management of soybean in Amazon forest soils on the abundance and composition of the acidobacterial community. Quantitative real-time PCR (q-PCR) assays and pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA gene were applied to study the acidobacterial community in bulk soil samples from soybean croplands and adjacent native forests, and mesocosm s...

In this study, batch sorption and desorption experiments were conducted for testosterone using four agricultural soils and five clay minerals. Significant differences in sorption behavior were observed between abiotic and biotic systems. The Freundlich sorption coefficient Kf ðμg=gÞ=ðμg=mLÞn ranged from 8.53 to 74.46 for soils and from 35.28 to 1,243 for clays. The maximum sorption capacity (μg...

Agricultural soils constitute highly diverse ecosystems with very rich bacterial populations. Recent studies employing next-generation sequencing techniques have begun to explore the dynamics of bacterial species of such soils and utilized metagenomics approaches to understand how the diversity in soil microorganisms is affected or modified by agricultural practices. Understanding any microorga...

Viral community structures in complex agricultural soils are largely unknown. Electron microscopy and viromic analyses were conducted on six typical Chinese agricultural soil samples. Tailed bacteriophages, spherical and filamentous viral particles were identified by the morphological analysis. Based on the metagenomic analysis, single-stranded DNA viruses represented the largest viral componen...