Anthropogenic fires affected the temperate deciduous forests of Central Europe over millennia. Biomass burning releases carbon to the atmosphere and produces charcoal, which potentially contributes to the stable soil carbon pools and is an important archive of environmental history. The fate of charcoal in soils of temperate deciduous forests, i.e. the processes of charcoal incorporation and tr...

Geochemical and biological processes that operate in the soil matrix and on the soil surface are important to the degradation of biosolids in soil. Due to the large surface area of soils it is assumed that the microbial ecology is associated with mineral soil surface area. The total mineral surface areas were determined for soils from eight different fields selected from a long term study (1972...

Seasonal changes in soil respiration (SR), soil temperature (ST) and soil moisture (SM) were compared between a barren land with no vegetation (control) and grassland dominated by Heteropogon contortus (L.) of a semi-arid eco-system during 2005-2006. A statistically significant (p<0.001) seasonal change in SR was observed between the two sites. The variation characteristics of soil CO2 effiux r...

Florida Everglades restoration plans are aimed at maintaining and restoring characteristic landscape features such as soil, vegetation, and hydrologic patterns. This study presents the results from an exhaustive spatial sampling of key soil properties in Water Conservation Area 1 (WCA 1), which is part of the northern Everglades. Three soil strata were sampled: floc, upper 0- to 10-cm soil laye...

To date, few studies are conducted to quantify the effects of reduced ammonium (NH4+) and oxidized nitrate (NO3-) on soil CH4 uptake and N2O emission in the subtropical forests. In this study, NH4Cl and NaNO3 fertilizers were applied at three rates: 0, 40 and 120 kg N ha(-1) yr(-1). Soil CH4 and N2O fluxes were determined twice a week using the static chamber technique and gas chromatography. S...

Trace gas exchange of N2O, NO/NO2 and CH4 between soil and the atmosphere was measured in a typical Mediterranean pine (Pinus pinaster) forest during two intensive field campaigns in spring and autumn 2003. Furthermore, gross and net turnover rates of N mineralization and nitrification as well as soil profiles of N2O and CH4 concentrations were determined. For both seasons a weak but significan...

Field experiments were carried out at JUST agricultural research center during 1999-2000 growing season to evaluate the effects of soil amendment with olive mill by-products (Jift) on growth of faba bean and their symbiosis with VA fungi. Soil was amended with Jift at different levels (Jift: Soil; 0:10, 1:9, 2:8, 3:7 and 4:6) and exposed to solarization, methyl bromide and fungicide treatments....

[1] The cosmic-ray neutron probe measures soil moisture over tens of hectares, thus averaging spatially variable soil moisture fields. A previous paper described how variable soil moisture profiles affect the integrated cosmic-ray neutron signal from which depthaverage soil moisture is computed. Here, we investigate the effect of horizontal heterogeneity on the relationship between neutron coun...

Assignment of soils to hydrologic soil groups has been based on published criteria subjectively interpreted and applied by soil scientists. As a result hydrologic soil group placement for any given soil lacks consistency of method and correlation to the respective soil's physical properties. A method of placing soil into hydrologic soil groups was developed using fuzzy systems techniques. This ...

In order to discover the advantages and disadvantages of different fertilization regimes and identify the best management practice of fertilization in greenhouse fields, soil enzyme activities involved in carbon (C) transformations, soil chemical characteristics, and crop yields were monitored after long-term (20-year) fertilization regimes, including no fertilizer (CK), 300 kg N ha-1 and 600 k...