Soil and Water Research, 2022 (vol. 17), issue 3

The impact of forest naturalness and tree species composition on soil organic carbon content in areas with unnatural occurrence of Norway spruce in the Czech RepublicOriginal Paper

Marián Horváth, Petra Hanáková Bečvářová, Bořivoj Šarapatka, Václav Zouhar

Soil & Water Res., 2022, 17(3):139-148 | DOI: 10.17221/19/2022-SWR  

Climate change has increased attention paid in the research to forest soils and tree species composition, in respect to the potential for carbon sequestration. It is known that forest stands are able to store soil organic carbon (SOC), but little is known about the effect of forest naturalness on SOC content. This is important in relation of dying of unnatural spruce stands. It is necessary to determine a suitable composition of tree species which will replace them. This research is based on 248 plots with oak, beech, and spruce stands and mixtures of these species, with measured values of SOC. Our results show that autochthonous and mixed stands,...

Soil organic carbon fractions comparison after 40-year long-term fertilisation in a wheat-corn rotation fieldOriginal Paper

Xiaolu Sun, Jingtao Liu, Shutang Liu, Wenlong Gao

Soil & Water Res., 2022, 17(3):149-157 | DOI: 10.17221/144/2021-SWR  

Several experimental methods have been developed to fractionate soil organic carbon (SOC) into functional sub-pools. However, which fractions had the potential to better reflect the SOC dynamics responding to fertilisation are still under discussion. Thus, we compared different SOC fractions (microbial biomass carbon, MBC; dissolved organic carbon, DOC; permanganate-oxidisable carbon, POXC; particle organic carbon, POC, and aggregation organic carbon fractions) and the soil respiration rate in a wheat-corn rotation field after 40 years of manure and N fertilisation in North China to search for the most sensitive SOC fractions to fertilisation. Manure...

Construction and calibration of a portable rain simulator designed for the in situ research of soil resistance to erosionOriginal Paper

Nikola Živanović, Vukašin Rončević, Marko Spasić, Stevan Ćorluka, Siniša Polovina

Soil & Water Res., 2022, 17(3):158-169 | DOI: 10.17221/148/2021-SWR  

Land degradation caused by erosion processes is a widespread global problem. Rain simulators are one of the tools often used to determine the resistance of soils to erosion processes. The aim of this publication is to present the process of the construction and calibration of a small, portable field simulator which would be implemented in research studies designed to determine the changes in the soils' shear strength parameters in forested areas (in situ) caused by a change in soil moisture content achieved by the rain simulation. The constructed simulator consists of a metal frame, sprayers (with specific nozzles), a sediment funnel/tray...

Irrigation quotas influenced the characteristics of the preferential flow in cotton fields under mulched drip irrigation in Northwest ChinaOriginal Paper

Rui Chen, Zhenhua Wang, Tianyu Wang, Xiaodi Wu

Soil & Water Res., 2022, 17(3):170-179 | DOI: 10.17221/74/2021-SWR  

Preferential flow is associated with potential issues of poor irrigation water-fertiliser efficiency in a cultivated field. In addition, a preliminary understanding of how irrigation quotas contribute to this prevalent phenomenon is limited. Thus, one blank control group and three different irrigation quotas were set (0, 450, 550 and 650 mm) and the dye tracing image method was applied to investigate the characteristics of the preferential flow in cotton fields under mulched drip irrigation. On the basis of the results, we found significant differences in the preferential flow degree between the four groups (P = 0.02); the mean scores of the...

Soil-conservation effect of intercrops in silage maizeOriginal Paper

David Kincl, Pavel Formánek, Jan Vopravil, Pavel Nerušil, Ladislav Menšík, Jaroslava Janků

Soil & Water Res., 2022, 17(3):180-190 | DOI: 10.17221/36/2022-SWR  

More than 50% of agricultural land is threatened by water erosion in the Czech Republic. With respect to soil erosion, maize (Zea mays L.) belongs to the most problematic crops; one of the possibilities to increase protection against erosion is intercropping. In this study, we attempted to find out the effects of individual intercrops and their mixtures (sown 4-6 weeks after sowing maize) or a mixed culture (maize plus lupine) on the soil losses and surface runoff in the period 2019-2021. The study was realised in a sugar beet growing region (Haplic Luvisol); a field rainfall simulator was used. From the used variants with Lolium perenne...

Antioxidant response by alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) to Pb pollution - A study to value the feasibility of soil phytoremediationOriginal Paper

Changfeng Liu, Ye Wang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Gong-Ling Zhang, Xuegui Liu, Pinyi Gao, Shuhua Yao

Soil & Water Res., 2022, 17(3):191-199 | DOI: 10.17221/132/2021-SWR  

With the surrounding environment of Inner Mongolia lead (Pb) ore as the research background, the germination and physio-biochemical effects of Pb stress on alfalfa were discussed to employ this species for the remediation of Pb contaminated soil. Research has shown that a low Pb stress concentration could improve the biological resistance of alfalfa seeds, while a high Pb stress concentration cannot be tolerated. Interestingly, when the Pb concentration was 5 mg/L, the germination rate of the seed was promoted, and the chlorophyll content was especially increased. As the Pb content and stress increased, the amount of malondialdehyde (MDA), H2O2, catalase...