South Africa has a wide range of soils and climates. Extensive studies, especially over the past 25 years, have been conducted into practices and systems which could conserve the soil, water, energy and other resources required for sustainable crop production under various of these soil and climate combinations. Some of the results obtained and ongoing or envisaged work is outlined. It is hypot...

The formation of fertility islands by shrubs increases soil resources heterogeneity in thicketization-grasslands. Clonal plants, especially rhizomatous or stoloniferous clonal plants, can form large clonal networks and use heterogeneously distributed resources effectively. In addition, shrubs, especially spiny shrubs, may also provide herbaceous plants with protection from herbivores, acting as...

Especially over the last 100 years, our unbridled exploitation of the world’s natural resources has severely damaged its vegetation and has also resulted in worrying accumulations of in‐ dustrial wastes and greenhouse gases. Together, these have upset natural ecosystem balances and have created many environment and climatic problems, including rising temperatures, in‐ creasing desertification, ...

Soil classification has proceeded along the classical path of biological classifications but has not produced an internationally accepted system even though the WRB is supported by the IUSS. More recently Mazaheri et al. (1995a, 1995b) have tried to introduce Fuzzy logic into soil classification. They achieved a small amount of success when their technique was applied to selected soils in Austr...

Peatlands are an important global carbon reservoir. The continued accumulation of carbon in peatlands depends on the persistence of anoxic conditions, in part induced by water saturation, which prevents oxidation of organic matter, and slows down decomposition. Here we investigate how and over what time scales the hydrological regime impacts the geochemistry and the bacterial community structur...

Protecting water resources from nitrate-nitrogen (NO3-N) contamination is an important public health concern and a major national environmental issue in China. Loss of NO3-N in soils due to leaching is not only one of the most important problems in agriculture farming, but is also the main factor causing nitrogen pollution in aquatic environments. Three typical intensive agriculture farmlands i...

The EU FOCUS scenarios are a set of nine standard scenarios based on a combination of crop, soil and weather data used throughout Europe to evaluate the leaching potential of pesticides to groundwater. In Ireland, two predefined EU FOCUS scenarios (Okehampton and Hamburg) appear to be the most appropriate to Irish conditions. However, there is concern that these scenarios may not accurately rep...

population growth rating, high food demand, and land resource challenges have led to more serious studies of production factors especially the scarce water and soil resources. one of the most basic data items in land resources is the soil map. therefore, in the process of the present research for preparing soil maps of some soil quality indices at the faculty of agriculture experimental field (...