With this objective, a three year sampling plan was designed in the Shiraz vineyards of the Madrid region using three floor management strategies: bare soil by tillage, bare soil maintained with herbicides and soil maintained with cover crop.
Blocking areas with large portions of a diagnostic soil maintained the homogeneity of experimental plots and produced acceptable error terms in statistical procedures.
Long-term research has proved that vermicompost application to soil maintains its fertility and health, making it more suitable for crop production, and decreases dependency on chemicals.
Our results showed that the strains isolated from a highly contaminated soil maintained the capacity to use organic contaminants as metabolic carbon in aqueous extracts from the same soil.
The soil maintained the improved characteristics with further growth of the grass up to five years suggesting that growing salt-tolerant plants is a sustainable approach to biological amelioration of saline wastelands [ 80].
They also provide essential ecosystem services that support sustainable agriculture by regulating water flows, stabilizing soils, maintaining soil fertility, regulating the climate, and providing habitat for wild pollinators and the predators of agricultural pests.
Removal of crop residue from the field must be balanced against influencing the environment (soil erosion), maintaining soil organic matter levels, and preserving or enhancing productivity ([Wilhelm et al. 2004]).
Total acridine orange direct cell counts of the flushed and nonflushed soils decreased over the 15-week testing period, but after 5 weeks, the flushed soils maintained higher cell counts than the nonflushed soils.
For large mesocosms such as our 140 L units, it is logistically challenging to extract intact soil cores while maintaining soil structure, followed by autoclaving or hand sorting to eliminate earthworms and other soil biota.
