Search results for " SOIL"
showing 10 items of 774 documents
Application of EMI and FDR Sensors to Assess the Fraction of Transpirable Soil Water over an Olive Grove
2018
Accurate soil water status measurements across spatial and temporal scales are still a challenging task, specifically at intermediate spatial (0.1–10 ha) and temporal (minutes to days) scales. Consequently, a gap in knowledge limits our understanding of the reliability of the spatial measurements and its practical applicability in agricultural water management. This paper compares the cumulative EM38 (Geonics Ltd., Mississauga, ON, Canada) response collected by placing the sensor above ground with the corresponding soil water content obtained by integrating the values measured with an FDR (frequency domain reflectometry) sensor. In two field areas, characterized by different soil clay conte…
Artificial Neural Networks for Predicting the Water Retention Curve of Sicilian Agricultural Soils
2018
Modeling soil-water regime and solute transport in the vadose zone is strategic for estimating agricultural productivity and optimizing irrigation water management. Direct measurements of soil hydraulic properties, i.e., the water retention curve and the hydraulic conductivity function, are often expensive and time-consuming, and represent a major obstacle to the application of simulation models. As a result, there is a great interest in developing pedotransfer functions (PTFs) that predict the soil hydraulic properties from more easily measured and/or routinely surveyed soil data, such as particle size distribution, bulk density (&rho
Land Cadastre in Italy for Sustainable Development: Application to Two Parcels of Land in a Geopark in the Process of Being Defined in Corleone (PA-I…
2020
Geoparks, like all parks, are UNESCO awards for a sustainable management of all resources and therefore also of human life. Environmental emergencies such as climate change, pollution, soil erosion, salinisation, and fires that, together with health emergencies, undermine life on earth, require intervention. The widespread sustainable management of the territory of a municipality, a region, a nation, or all of them (European Union) allows to widen the application of these concepts to reach the limit of a planet that guarantees life for future generations. The work after having exposed the motivations of the geopark (an initiative born by chance), i.e. the surface where the environmental bea…
Soil Cadastre in Italy for Sustainable Development: the Urban Soil Cadastre (the Second Branch)
2020
The description of the second branch of the Land Cadastre concludes with the description of the structure of the new inventory Land Cadastre. The principles applied are always the same: computer node where all the information present in the various municipal, regional, state, reclamation consortia and research centres can be entered. The scheme used in each branch of the structure is that of the current Cadastre. In this work the guide is the Urban or Buildings with the two elements the Particle Map Sheet and the Cadastral Certificate. The cultural intensification is the first step and concerns both the cartographic part and the areas of the condominiums outside the buildings, and the parti…
Comparing Different approaches - Data mining, Geostatistic, and Deterministic pedology - to assess the Frequency of WRB reference soil groups in the …
2014
Estimating frequency of soil classes in map unit is always affected by some degree of uncertainty, especially at small scales, with a larger generalization. The aim of this study was to compare different possible approaches - data mining, geostatistic, deterministic pedology - to assess the frequency of WRB Reference Soil Groups (RSG) in the major Italian soil regions. In the soil map of Italy (Costantini et al., 2012), a list of the first five RSG was reported in each major 10 soil regions. The soil map was produced using the national soil geodatabase, which stored 22,015 analyzed and classified pedons, 1,413 soil typological unit (STU) and a set of auxiliary variables (lithology, land-use…
Biogenic Fenton process - A possible mechanism for the mineralization of organic carbon in fresh waters.
2020
To explore the mechanisms that mineralize poorly bioavailable natural organic carbon (OC), we measured the mineralization of OC in two lake waters over long-term experiments (up to 623 days) at different pH and iron (Fe) levels. Both the microbial and photochemical mineralization of OC was higher at pH acidified to 4 than at the ambient pH 5 or an elevated pH 6. During 244 days, microbes mineralized up to 60% of OC in the 10-mu m filtrates of lake water and more than 27% in the 1-mu m filtrates indicating that large-sized microbes/grazers enhance the mineralization of OC. A reactivity continuum model indicated that the acidification stimulated the microbial mineralization of OC especially i…
Diuron mobility through vineyard soils contaminated with copper
2005
International audience; The herbicide diuron is frequently applied to vineyard soils in Burgundy, along with repeated treatments with Bordeaux mixture (a blend of copper sulfate and calcium hydroxide) that result in elevated copper concentrations. Cu could in principle affect the fate and transport of diuron or its metabolites in the soil either directly by complexation or indirectly by altering the populations or activity of microbes involved in their degradation. To assess the effect of high Cu concentrations on diuron transport, an experiment was designed with ten undisturbed columns of calcareous and acidic soils contaminated with 17–509 mg kg−1 total Cu (field-applied). Grass was plant…
Influence of cultivation techniques and use of two nutritive solution with different electrical conductivity on the production and quality of cucumbe…
2009
The most suitable techniques and use of F1 hybrids enable greenhouse production to achieve high yields, with crops all year round. In Sicily, greenhouse production of cucumber is for fresh use (slicers), producing large fruit. The cultivation technique most suited to greenhouses is the vertical single stem. However, an innovative technique being proposed is of cultivation on a trellis, eliminating lower branches, and training the remaining branches upwards (vertical shoot positioning, VSP). Cucumbers in the south of Italy are grown as the main crop or as a catch crop between 2 main crops. The crop should be rotated on the same soil only after 3-4 years with another crop, unless the land is …
Data from: The origin of the serpentine endemic Minuartia laricifolia subsp. ophiolitica by vicariance and competitive exclusion
2013
Serpentine soils harbour a unique flora that is rich in endemics. We examined the evolution of serpentine endemism in Minuartia laricifolia, which has two ecologically distinct subspecies with disjunct distributions: subsp. laricifolia on siliceous rocks in the western Alps and eastern Pyrenees and subsp. ophiolitica on serpentine in the northern Apennines. We analysed AFLPs and chloroplast sequences from 30 populations to examine their relationships and how their current distributions and ecologies were influenced by Quaternary climatic changes. Minuartia laricifolia was divided into four groups with a BAPS cluster analysis of the AFLP data, one group consisted only of subsp. ophiolitica, …
Microbial technologies for the discovery of novel bioactive metabolites
2002
Soil microbes represent an important source of biologically active compounds. These molecules present original and unexpected structure and are selective inhibitors of their molecular targets. At Biosearch Italia, discovery of new bioactive molecules is mostly carried out through the exploitation of a proprietary strain collection of over 50000 strains, mostly unusual genera of actinomycetes and uncommon filamentous fungi. A critical element in a drug discovery based on microbial extracts is the isolation of unexploited groups of microorganisms that are at the same time good producers of secondary metabolites. Molecular genetics can assist in these efforts. We will review the development an…