Pecologix

The anthropogenic rise in atmospheric CO2 is expected to impact carbon (C) fluxes not only at ecosystem level but also at the global scale by altering C cycle processes in soils. At the Swiss Canopy Crane (SCC), we examined how 7 years of free air CO2 enrichment (FACE) affected soil CO2 dynamics in a ca. [...]

The southwestern portion of the Brazilian Amazon arguably represents the largest agricultural frontier in the world, and within this region the states of Rondônia and Mato Grosso have about 24% and 32% of their respective areas under agricultural management, which is almost half of the total area deforested in the Brazilian Amazon biome. Consequently, it [...]

Tree cover in savanna ecosystems is usually regarded as unstable, varying with rainfall, fire, and herbivory [[1], [2], [3] and [4]]. In sub-Saharan Africa, elephants (Loxodonta africana) suppress tree cover, thereby maintaining landscape heterogeneity by promoting tree-grass coexistence. In the absence of elephants, tree encroachment may convert savannas into closed-canopy woodlands [[5] and [6]]; when [...]

A six month field scale study was carried out to compare windrow turning and biopile techniques for the remediation of soil contaminated with bunker C fuel oil. End-point clean-up targets were defined by human risk assessment and ecotoxicological hazard assessment approaches. Replicate windrows and biopiles were amended with either nutrients and inocula, nutrients alone or [...]

In this article description of various technology applications for passive and active utilization of solar radiation is presented, as well as some results of short-term and long-term experiments, including evaluation of 1-year operation of the greenhouse from the energy and interior temperature viewpoints. A comparison of the calculated energy flows in the greenhouse to real [...]

The U.S. harvests around 68 million metric tons of wheat each year. There are two ways to increase this amount: One is to change farming practices by, say, increasing the amount of cultivated or irrigated acreage. The other is to breed the crop to be more prolific by introducing attributes that make it mature at [...]

Various studies have documented the effects of modern-day irrigation on regional and global climate, but none, to date, have considered the time-varying impact of steadily increasing irrigation rates on climate during the 20th century. We investigate the impacts of observed irrigation changes over this century with two ensemble simulations using an atmosphere general circulation model. [...]