Increased wheat yield and soil C stocks after silica fertilization at the field scale.

Increased crop production is a main goal to feed the predicted human population in future. The current management practice is, however, not sustainable as it depends on high amounts of fertilizer application and is highly vulnerable to decreased soil water availability. At the same time it becomes more and more crucial to reduce or even mitigate anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Infected grasses as inoculum for Fusarium infestation and mycotoxin accumulation in wheat with and without irrigation.

Grasses growing next to agricultural fields influence the Fusarium abundance, the species composition, and the mycotoxin accumulation of wheat plants, especially the field parts directly adjacent to grasses, are highly affected. Grasses are a more attractive and suitable habitat for Fusarium fungi compared to other arable weeds and occur at mostly every semi-natural landscape element (e.g.

Silica fertilization improved wheat performance and increased phosphorus concentrations during drought at the field scale.

Drought and the availability of mineable phosphorus minerals used for fertilization are two of the important issues agriculture is facing in the future. High phosphorus availability in soils is necessary to maintain high agricultural yields. Drought is one of the major threats for terrestrial ecosystem performance and crop production in future.

Global data on earthworm abundance, biomass, diversity and corresponding environmental properties.

Earthworms are an important soil taxon as ecosystem engineers, providing a variety of crucial ecosystem functions and services. Little is known about their diversity and distribution at large spatial scales, despite the availability of considerable amounts of local-scale data. Earthworm diversity data, obtained from the primary literature or provided directly by authors, were collated with information on site locations, including coordinates, habitat cover, and soil properties.

Pseudomonas simiae effects on the mycotoxin formation by fusaria and alternaria in vitro and in a wheat field.

Fluorescent pseudomonads colonizing wheat ears have a high antagonistic potential against phytopathogenic fungi. To check this hypothesis, the bacterial antagonist Pseudomonas simiae 9 was spray-inoculated onto the ears of winter wheat in a locally demarcated experimental field plot. Fusarium and Alternaria fungi naturally occurring on the ears and the formation of their mycotoxins in the ripe grains were investigated.

Proximal Soil Sensing - A Contribution for Species Habitat Distribution Modelling of Earthworms in Agricultural Soils?

Background: Earthworms are important for maintaining soil ecosystem functioning and serve as indicators of soil fertility. However, detection of earthworms is time-consuming, which hinders the assessment of earthworm abundances with high sampling density over entire fields. Recent developments of mobile terrestrial sensor platforms for proximal soil sensing (PSS) provided new tools for collecting dense spatial information of soils using various sensing principles.