Soil quality under different land uses in eastern India: Evaluation by using soil indicators and quality index.

Indian soils are inherently poor in quality due to the warm climate and erosion. Conversion of land uses like forests to croplands and faulty management practices in croplands further cause soil degradation. This study aimed to understand the extent of these impacts in a small representative part of eastern India, covering Himalayan terai and nearing alluvial plains.

Optimization of deficit irrigation and nitrogen fertilizer management for peanut production in an arid region.

Deficit irrigation (DI) has been emerging as an important technique for enhancing crop water productivity (WP). However, advantage of DI under varying nitrogen (N) application rates remains unclear. Field experiments were conducted during 2012-2014 to investigate the impacts of six irrigation levels[FI (full irrigation), DI, DI, DI, DI and DI, with irrigation amount of 100, 90, 80, 70, 60 and 50% of ETc, respectively) and four N application rates (N, N, N and N, with 0, 10, 20 and 30 kg N ha, respectively) on WP, yield, quality, and net economic return of peanut in hot arid region of India.

Spatial structure, parameter nonlinearity, and intelligent algorithms in constructing pedotransfer functions from large-scale soil legacy data.

Pedotransfer function (PTF) approach is a convenient way for estimating difficult-to-measure soil properties from basic soil data. Typically, PTFs are developed using a large number of samples collected from small (regional) areas for training and testing a predictive model. National soil legacy databases offer an opportunity to provide soil data for developing PTFs although legacy data are sparsely distributed covering large areas.

Spatial assessment of soil organic carbon and physicochemical properties in a horticultural orchard at arid zone of India using geostatistical approaches.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a major indicator of long-term sustenance of agricultural production system. Apart from sustaining productivity, SOC plays a crucial role in context of climate change. Keeping in mind these potentials, spatial variation of SOC contents of a fruit orchard comprising several arid fruit plantations located at arid region of India is assessed in this study through geostatistical approaches.

Geostatistical approach for management of soil nutrients with special emphasis on different forms of potassium considering their spatial variation in intensive cropping system of West Bengal, India.

A large part of precision agriculture research in the developing countries is devoted towards precision nutrient management aspects. This has led to better economics and efficiency of nutrient use with off-farm advantages of environmental security. The keystone of precision nutrient management is analysis and interpretation of spatial variability of soils by establishing management zones.