Seeing the sustainability of rice-wheat cropping system (RWCS) of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, adequate crop nutrition in general and nitrogen (N) in particular holds the key to sound crop management. The excessive application or insufficient management of N means an economic loss to the farmer and may lead to yield penalties and environmental problems. Improving N management in consonance with oth...

Background: Changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks significantly influence the atmospheric C concentration. Agricultural management practices that increase SOC stocks thus may have profound effects on climate mitigation. Additional benefits include higher soil fertility since increased SOC stocks improve the physical and biological properties of the soil. Intensification of agriculture and...

Agricultural soils are heterogeneous environments in which conditions affecting microbial growth and diversity fluctuate widely in space and time. In this study, the molecular ecology of the total bacterial and free-living nitrogen-fixing communities in soils from the Nafferton Factorial Systems Comparison (NFSC) study in northeast England were examined. The field experiment was factorial in de...

Although it is widely acknowledged that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations will increase crop root growth, no study has considered how this response could be influenced by agricultural management practices. Therefore, we examined the influence of elevated atmospheric CO2 (ambient + 360 mmol mol ) on root dynamics of sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) produced under conventional (tillage following win...

This study provides a spatially comprehensive assessment of sustainable agricultural residue removal potential across the United States for bioenergy production. Earlier assessments determining the quantity of agricultural residue that could be sustainably removed for bioenergy production at the regional and national scale faced a number of computational limitations. These limitations included ...

1 Canola was developed in Canada in the 1970s as an edible cultivar of rapeseed (Brassica napus L.) with low glucosinolates and low erucic acid. Currently, canola is grown on eight million ha of agricultural land in Canada, which is 22% of the global canola area. More than half of the harvested canola seeds in Canada are exported, accounting for 46% of the international canola market (FAOSTAT, ...

An integrated model WHCNS (soil Water Heat Carbon Nitrogen Simulator) was developed to assess water and nitrogen (N) management in North China. It included five main modules: soil water, soil temperature, soil carbon (C), soil N, and crop growth. The model integrated some features of several widely used crop and soil models, and some modifications were made in order to apply the WHCNS model und...