Microclimate and soil moisture effects of three intercrops on the rows of a newly-planted intercropped plantation

Trees are grown in intercropping systems for a variety of purposes including wood products, fuelwood, fruit, forage or conservation purposes. No matter what end use, different tree/crop combinations interact differently resulting in differential growth rates of the trees during establishment. Preliminary work has shown that seedling growth and survival of trees are related to their intercrop and the results of this study help to explain these findings. Soil water potential, soil and air temperature, relative humidity, windspeed, and light (photosynthetic photon flux density — PPFD) were measured throughout the growing season in the clean-weeded treerows within crops of corn, soybeans and winter wheat. Crop height and biomass were also measured. This study was conducted during the 1992 growing season which was unusually cool and wet from mid June into the winter. The growth of winter wheat, measured by crop height and above-ground biomass, was earlier in the season than that of soybeans and corn, and this pattern affected the environmental conditions in the tree rows. Soil water potential was affected with associated effects on soil temperature (in combination with other factors). Crop height drastically reduced windspeed in the corn treatment from July through winter, also affecting PPFD and soil temperature later in the year. Although many microclimate differences were relatively small, data from subsequent years as well as associated soil moisture studies and additional years will help to further elucidate these relationships.     

水分对栗钙土理化性质及杨树生长的影响

采用野外调查和室内测试相结合的方法,研究了水分对栗钙土理化性质和杨树生长的影响.结果表明:由于过水林地比未过水林地具有较低的容重和土壤硬度、较高的土壤持水能力以及较高的有机质、全氮、全磷和有效氮含量,使得过水林地上杨树人工林的直径、树高和材积生长量、各级根系长度、根系总长度和根系总生物量整体上超过来过水林地.     

A calibration method of detecting soil water content based on the information-sharing in wireless sensor network

In agricultural production, there is contradiction between the cost and accuracy of detection during the course of acquiring soil water content (θ) online. This conflict is one of the core issues of automatic water-saving irrigation technology in agriculture. At the same time, capacitive soil moisture sensor (CSMS) has received considerable attention, for it can acquire θ with low cost and high precision, and meet the application requirements of wireless sensor network (WSN). But CSMS is vulnerable to the soil temperature (T_s) and salinity (S_s) in the measurement process. Therefore, this study took EC-5 sensor for example to establish water detection calibration models of soil temperature and salinity for single sensor, using Least Squares Support Vector Machines on MatLAB (LS-SVMlab) as the tool. On this basis, we explored the spatial variability of T_s and S_s, and then a method, which could be used to calibrate the output signals of sensors in multi-point network, was proposed based on the information-sharing (T_s or S_s) technology of WSN. Through laboratory experiment, we effectively reduced the impact of soil temperature and salinity on the single sensor. In example analysis, we investigated the detection precision and costs under different information-sharing radiuses (r). And the results indicated that the method we proposed based on the information-sharing technology of WSN could successfully calibrate the influence of soil temperature and salinity on sensors in multi-point network, and it was an efficacious approach to determine the balance between the calibration accuracy of moisture sensor and the investment of agricultural production. For example, while the calibration precision of soil temperature and salinity is respectively 1%, the costs can be reduced by 30%.