Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for plant growth – including the algae that grow in rivers and lakes. When phosphorus is lost from agricultural soils into waterways, it can allow algae to grow rapidly, which causes problems for fish and humans.
Plants can’t access all of the water that’s stored in the soil. Some water is held tightly in very small pores, some water freely drains through large pores, and some is held loosely by the soil so that it isn’t lost but plants can still use it.
The warming of the earth’s climate and an increasing global population is presenting enormous challenges for the agricultural industry to increase food production. More frequent extreme weather events caused by climate change, such as drought, are problematic for the Northern Corn Belt, where simple two-crop rotations of corn and soybean are common.
Alison King, Genevieve Ali, Adam Gillespie, Claudia Wagner-Riddle. 2020. Soil organic matter as catalyst of crop resource capture. Frontiers in Environmental Science. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2020.00050Research summary by Alison King and Cameron…
Fu, Y., P. Taneja, S. Lin, W. Ji, V. Adamchuk, P. Daggupati, Biswas, A. 2019. Predicting soil organic matter from cellular phone images under varying soil moisture. Geoderma: 114020. doi:10.1016/j.geoderma.2019.114020…
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