Field leaching of pesticides at five test sites in Hawaii: modeling flow and transport

BACKGROUND: Physically based tier‐II models may serve as possible alternatives to expensive field and laboratory leaching experiments required for pesticide approval and registration. The objective of this study was to predict pesticide fate and transport at five different sites in Hawaii using data from an earlier field leaching experiment and a one‐dimensional tier‐II model. As the predicted concentration profiles of pesticides did not provide close agreement with data, inverse modeling was used to obtain adequate reactive transport parameters. The estimated transport parameters of pesticides were also utilized in a tier‐I model, which is currently used by the state authorities to evaluate the relative leaching potential. RESULTS: Water flow in soil profiles was simulated by the tier‐II model with acceptable accuracy at all experimental sites. The observed concentration profiles and center of mass depths predicted by the tier‐II simulations based on optimized transport parameters provided better agreements than did the non‐optimized parameters. With optimized parameters, the tier‐I model also delivered results consistent with observed pesticide center of mass depths. CONCLUSION: Tier‐II numerical modeling helped to identify relevant transport processes in field leaching of pesticides. The process‐based modeling of water flow and pesticide transport, coupled with the inverse procedure, can contribute significantly to the evaluation of chemical leaching in Hawaii soils. Copyright © 2011 Society of Chemical Industry     

Weed populations in winter wheat as affected by crop sequence, intensity of tillage and time of herbicide application in a cool and humid climate

Summary There is a lack of information on the combined effects of preceding crop, reduced tillage (especially no-tillage) and the time of herbicide application on the development of weed populations and the efficiency of weed control in winter wheat in humid temperate climates. An experiment was conducted with a crop rotation (winter wheat – oilseed rape – winter wheat – maize) on a sandy loam and a loamy silt soil in the Swiss midlands to investigate the impact of different preceding crops and pre- and post-emergence control of weeds in conventional tillage (CT; mouldboard plough), minimum tillage (MT; chisel plough) and no-tillage (NT; no soil disturbance systems). When winter wheat was grown after maize and winter wheat was grown after oilseed rape, the ranking order of weed density in treatments without herbicide application was NT < MT < CT and CT < MT < NT respectively. Analysis of variance and canonical discriminant analysis showed that Epilobium spp., Sonchus arvensis , Myosotis arvensis and volunteer crops were more abundant in NT than in MT and CT. The efficiency of post-emergence weed control was generally better than that of pre-emergence weed control, regardless of tillage intensity.     

液流—株间微型蒸渗仪法测定新疆杨蒸发蒸腾量适用性分析

采用液流—株间微型蒸渗仪法测定人工种植环境下新疆杨蒸发蒸腾量,并对此方法的适用性进行了分析。结果表明：在生长季5—10月,新疆杨蒸腾量具有明显的季节变化规律,总蒸发蒸腾量为508.26 mm,蒸发量、蒸腾量所占比率分别为37.1%和62.9%;树干液流速率与叶片蒸腾速率变化表现出较好的一致性,热脉冲法能够用于新疆杨蒸腾测定;液流—株间微型蒸渗仪法和水量平衡法测算结果的相对误差在±15%之内,液流—株间微型蒸渗仪法能够适用于新疆杨蒸发蒸腾量测定。