Maintenance and improvement of soil quality in continuous cropping systems is critical to sustaining agricultural productivity and environmental quality for future generations. This review focuses on lessons learned from long-term continuous cropping experiments. Soil organic carbon (SOC) is the most often reported attribute from long-term studies and is chosen as the most important indicator o...

The soil quality concept evolved throughout the 1990s in response to increased global emphasis on sustainable land use and with a holistic focus emphasizing that sustainable soil management requires more than soil erosion control. The concept includes two areas of emphasis—education and assessment—both based soundly on principles of soil science. Soil quality test kits, farmer-based scorecards,...

the peak temperature in the sample was directly measured while the laser power was slowly increased. As soon as melting occurred in the hottest portion of the sample, the absorption increased drastically, leading to "runaway" melting and subsequent melting phenomena [figure 2B of (1)]. The melting temperatures we reported are the last temperatures of the solid before melting set in. We stated (...

Soil quality and health are terms describing similar concepts, but the latter appeals to farmers and crop consultants as part of a holistic approach to soil management. We regard soil health as the integration and optimization of the physical, biological and chemical aspects of soils for improved productivity in an economic and sustainable manner. This paper describes the process used for the s...

Labile, 'high-quality', plant litters are hypothesized to promote soil organic matter (SOM) stabilization in mineral soil fractions that are physicochemically protected from rapid mineralization. However, the effect of litter quality on SOM stabilization is inconsistent. High-quality litters, characterized by high N concentrations, low C/N ratios, and low phenol/lignin concentrations, are not c...

a study was conducted to determine suitable soil properties as soil quality indicators, using factor analysis in order to evaluate the effects of land use change on loessial hillslope soils of the shastkola district in golestan province, northern iran. to this end, forty surface soil (0-30 cm) samples were collected from four adjacent sites with the following land uses systems: (1) natural fore...

in this study, micromorphological properties of some samples collected from pedons polluted with petroleum refinery wastes and some adjacent unpolluted pedons were studied. after description of the studied pedons, disturbed and undisturbed samples were collected for physicochemical and micromorphological analyses. the results showed that the physicochemical properties (i.e. structure, bulk dens...

the aim of this research was to compare the amounts of existing mineral elements in plant aerial parts, litter and soil ofthree range species (bromus tomentellus, psathyrostachys fragilis, agropyron tauri) in order to investigate the litter effectof species on soil properties of taleghan rangeland. the measured mineral elements include carbon, nitrogen,phosphorous and potassium. after selection...

abstract water retention curve (wrc) is a fundamental property of soil. it is used to evaluate available water, permeability, drainage and movement of solutes. despite numerous studies on wrc of soils abroad, no local study has been carried out on charmahal-va-bakhtiari soils. the objective of this study was to compare the quality of fitting of several wrc models to lordegan soils and to select...

After the mining of mineral resource, mineland resources utilization became increasingly complicated. Soil and planting information can be used as the indicators to evaluate mineland reclamation level. In order to obtain the soil and planting information in real time, a CDMA-based soil-quality monitoring system was developed to wirelessly monitor air/soil environment and plant image in remote o...