This review focuses on conservation agriculture (CA) and its effects on increasing the soil’s resistance to erosion. CA involves minimum soil disturbance (minimum tillage/ no-till), diversified crop rotation, and maintenance of the soil cover to increase soil fertility and reduce erosion. CA reduces soil loss by up to 90% and water erosion by approximately 50 to 70% from runoff as it increases the health of the soil, yield of crops, and water-retention capacity of the soil by incorporating soil organic matter and promoting biodiversity. Crop rotation prevents the replenishment and depletion of soil nutrients by atmospheric fixation of nitrogen/biological nitrogen fixation. Controlled traffic farming (CTF) is a new strategy in which travel

In the case where a shallow foundation does not satisfy with design requirements alone, the addition of a pile may be suitable to improve the performance of the foundation design. The lack of in-situ data and the complexity of the issues caused by lagging in the research area of pile foundations are notable. In this study, different types of piles were used under the same geometric conditions to determine the load-settlement relationships with various sandy soil relative densities. The ultimate pile capacity for each selected pile is obtained from a modified California Bearing Ratio (CBR) machine to be suitable for axial pile loading. Based on the results, the values of Qu for close-ended square pile were increased by 15

There are many aims of this book: The first aim is to develop a model equation that describes the spread of contamination through soils which can be used to determine the rate of environmental contamination by estimate the concentration of heavy metals (HMs) in soil. The developed model equation can be considered as a good representation for a problem of environmental contamination. The second aim of this work is to design two feed forward neural networks (FFNN) as an alternative accurate technique to determine the rate of environmental contamination which can be used to solve the model equation. The first network is to simulate the soil parameters which can be used as input data in the second suggested network, while the second network sim

The aim of this research work is to study the effect of stabilizing gypseous soil, which covers vast areas in the middle, west and south parts of Iraq, using liquid asphalt on its strength properties to be used as a base course layer replacing the traditional materials of coarse aggregate and broken stones which are scarce at economical prices and hauling distances. Gypseous soil brought from Al-Ramadi City, west of Iraq, with gypsum content of 66.65%, medium curing cutback asphalt (MC-30), and hydrated lime are used in this study. The conducted tests on untreated and treated gypseous soil with different percentages of medium curing cutback asphalt (MC-30), water, and lime were: unconfined compression strength, and one dimensional confine

This work focused on anthropogenic influences of the trace metals distribution in the soils of Kirkuk city. Sequential extraction technique was used to determine the distribution of the chemical fractions of Ag, Cd, Co, Cu, Ni, Pb, Zn, As, Cr and V in soil of Kirkuk city. This area is affected mainly by burning oil trash. Results show that these heavy metals were primarily restricted to surface horizons and mostly associated with the residual fraction (28.8 – 50%). The remnant fractions (13.8 – 33.1%) linked to the organic matter, 7.9 – 27.2% was bound to Fe-Mn oxide, 0.7 – 27.9 was bound to carbonate. Only a small amount of the total metals in the soil is exchangeable (0.5 – 4.2%) and water soluble (0 – 4.1%) fractions.

Water flow into unsaturated porous media is governed by the Richards’ partial differential equation expressing the mass conservation and Darcy’s laws. The Richards’ equation may be written in three forms,where the dependent variable is pressure head or moisture content, and the constitutive relationships between water content and pressure head allow for conversion of one form into the other. In the present paper, the “moisture-based" form of Richards’ equation is linearized by applying Kirchhoff’s transformation, which
combines the soil water diffusivity and soil water content. Then the similarity method is used to obtain the analytical solution of wetting front position. This exact solution is obtained by means of Lie’s

The placement of buildings and structures on/or adjacent to slopes is possible, but this poses a danger to the structure due to failures that occur in slopes. Therefore, a solution or improvement should be determined for these issues of the collapse of the structure as a result of the failure of the slopes. A laboratory model has been built to test the impact of some variables on the bearing capacity factor. The variables include the magnitude of static axial load applied at the center of footing, the depth of embedment, the spacing between geogrid reinforcement layer and the numbering of the geogrid sheet under the footing, the inclination angle of slope clayey soil (β), the spacing between the footing's edge and the slope's end (b/H). Th

Cyanobacteria are prokaryotic photosynthetic communities which are used in biofertilization of many plants especially rice plant. Cyanobacteria play a vital role to increase the plant's ability for salinity tolerance. Salinity is a worldwide problem which affects the growth and productivity of crops. In this work three cyanobacteria strains (Nostoc calcicola, Anabaena variabilis, and Nostoc linkia) were isolated from saline soil at Kafr El-Sheikh Governorate; North Egypt. The propagated cyanobacteria strains were used to withstand salinity of the soil and increase rice plant growth (Giza 178). The length of roots and shoot seedlings was measured for seven and forty days of cultivation, respectively. The results of this investigation showed