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The soil food web is the community of organisms living all or part of their lives in the soil. It describes a complex living system in the soil and how it interacts with the environment, plants, and animals. Food webs describe the transfer of energy between species in an ecosystem. While a food chain examines one, linear, energy pathway through ...
A water balance states that the amount water entering the soil must be equal to the amount of water leaving the soil plus the change in the amount of water stored in the soil. The water balance has four main components: infiltration of precipitation into the soil, evapotranspiration, leakage of water into deeper portions of the soil not ...
Soil is a variable mixture of broken and weathered minerals and decaying organic matter. Together with the proper amounts of air and water, it supplies, in part, sustenance for plants as well as mechanical support. The diversity and abundance of soil life exceeds that of any other ecosystem. Plant establishment, competitiveness, and growth is ...
Carbon is stored in the soil as organic matter and is respired by plants, bacteria, fungi and animals. When this respiration occurs below ground, it is considered soil respiration. Temperature, soil moisture and nitrogen all regulate the rate of this conversion from carbon in soil organic compounds to CO 2. Many methods are used to measure soil ...
Atterberg limits. The Atterberg limits are a basic measure of the critical water contents of a fine-grained soil: its shrinkage limit, plastic limit, and liquid limit. Depending on its water content, soil may appear in one of four states: solid, semi-solid, plastic and liquid. In each state, the consistency and behavior of soil are different ...
The Streeter–Phelps equation determines the relation between the dissolved oxygen concentration and the biological oxygen demand over time and is a solution to the linear first order differential equation [1] This differential equation states that the total change in oxygen deficit (D) is equal to the difference between the two rates of ...
Whiter soil tends to have a higher albedo than blacker soil cover, which encourages whiter soils to have lower soil temperatures. [85] The specific heat of soil is the energy required to raise the temperature of soil by 1 °C. The specific heat of soil increases as water content increases, since the heat capacity of water is greater than that ...
While related to soil temperature, it is more accurately associated with the transfer of energy (mostly in the form of heat) throughout the soil, by radiation, conduction and convection. The main soil thermal properties are. Volumetric heat capacity, SI Units: J∙m −3 ∙K −1. Thermal conductivity, SI Units: W∙m −1 ∙K −1.