Soil erosion by water is one of the major threats to soils in the European Union, with a negative impact on ecosystem services, crop production, drinking water and carbon stocks. The European Commission's Soil Thematic Strategy has identified soil erosion as a relevant issue for the European Union, and has proposed an approach to monitor soil erosion.

Old soil carbon (C) respired to the atmosphere as a result of permafrost thaw has the potential to become a large positive feedback to climate change. As permafrost thaws, quantifying old soil contributions to ecosystem respiration (Reco) and understanding how these contributions change with warming is necessary to estimate the size of this positive feedback. We used naturally occurring C isotopes (δ13C and Δ14C) to partition Reco into plant, young soil and old soil sources in a subarctic air and soil warming experiment over three years.

North East India (NEI) has 17.2 M ha under forest cover, which is ~25% of India’s total forest area. Of the total forest cover, 1.5 M ha is currently managed by shifting cultivation in NEI. Shifting cultivation, an integral part of culture and tradition of tribes of NEI, is presently unsustainable because of the populationdriven reduction in the duration of the fallow cycle (3–5 years).

Original Source

Anthropogenic nutrient flows exceed the planetary boundaries. The boundaries and the current excesses vary spatially. Such variations have both an ecological and a social facet. We explored the spatial variation using a bottom-up approach. The local critical boundaries were determined through the current or accumulated flow of the preceding five years before the planetary boundary criteria were met. Finland and Ethiopia served as cases with contrasting ecology and wealth. The variation in excess depends on historical global inequities in the access to nutrients.

Land use change can have negative or positive effects on soil quality. Our objective was to assess the effects of land uses changes on the dynamics of selected soil physical and chemical properties. Soil samples were collected from three adjacent land uses, namely forestland, grazing land and cultivated land at 0–15 cm depth, and tested in National Soil Testing Center, Ministry of Agriculture of Ethiopia.

Groundwater in the carbonate aquifers of the southern Andhra Pradesh, India has approached to stress level as water table has declined due to increasing groundwater draft, low to moderate rainfall, less availability or absence of surface water sources and semi-arid climate. In Kallugotla watershed of Kurnool district, groundwater is overexploited for irrigation and static water level exhibit declining trend. In order to manage the aquifers for sustainable water supply, understanding and accurate assessment of groundwater recharge is necessary.

Soil fungi have pivotal ecological roles as decomposers, pathogens and symbionts. Alterations to their diversity arising from climate change could have substantial effects on ecosystems, particularly those undergoing rapid warming that contain few species. Here, we report a study using pyrosequencing to assess fungal diversity in 29 soils sampled from a 1,650 km climatic gradient through the maritime Antarctic, the most rapidly warming region in the Southern Hemisphere.

Zinc (Zn) deficiency is the most widespread micronutrient deficiency in crop plants and humans. Low intake of Zn through diet appears to be the major reason for the widespread prevalence of Zn deficiencies in human populations. Application of Zn fertilizer in soil having low Zn increased the grain yield in wheat up to 6.4–50.1%. However, soil Zn application increased the grain yield of rice only up to 7.2–14.8%.

Stoichiometric approaches have been applied to understand the relationship between soil organic matter dynamics and biological nutrient transformations. However, very few studies explicitly considered the effects of agricultural management practices on soil C : N : P ratio. The aim of this study was to assess how different input types and rates would affect the C : N : P molar ratios of bulk soil, organic matter and microbial biomass in cropped soils in the long-term.