Political Ecology

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. [...]

The demand for organic fresh fruits and vegetable continues to grow at a rate far higher than the rest of the produce industry. The cost of meeting organic certification standards, however, has meant that supply has been slow to adjust. With limited supply, the authors hypothesize that organic suppliers enjoy more market power in bargaining [...]

To evaluate water treatment residue (WTR) as a soil substitute material, its physical properties were investigated and compared with decomposed granite soil (DGS). For comparison purposes, relative gas diffusivity (D/D0), saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks), water retention curve, porosity and readily available water were measured for both the WTR and the DGS. The measured D/D0, Ks, [...]

The first page of the calculator asks users to choose a county of interest from anywhere in the US. An input/output window allows them to choose which crops they will grow, yields, tillage practices, and nitrogen fertilizer rates. Default values based on localized USDA statistics are provided as a starting point. Given the farming practices [...]