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...

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...

during the recent decades, urban management in iran has increasingly confronted numerous challenges due to different kinds of social, cultural, political, executive, financial, and legal factors. the present study is going to specify and analyze the aforementioned challenges in the domain of the urban environment in order to determine how far they have been effective, how they have been priorit...

Taxonomic categories of the highest level (e.g. the RSG of the World Reference Base for soil resources) are not adequate when dealing with trace element concentrations in soils. This does not however mean that pedology, its basic concepts and knowledge accumulated over more than a century, are of no use in this domain. Examples of the role of soil forming processes on trace element contents in ...

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