The importance of long‐term experiments in agriculture: their management to ensure continued crop production and soil fertility; the Rothamsted experience

Summary Long‐term field experiments that test a range of treatments and are intended to assess the sustainability of crop production, and thus food security, must be managed actively to identify any treatment that is failing to maintain or increase yields. Once identified, carefully considered changes can be made to the treatment or management, and if they are successful yields will change. If suitable changes cannot be made to an experiment to ensure its continued relevance to sustainable crop production, then it should be stopped. Long‐term experiments have many other uses. They provide a field resource and samples for research on plant and soil processes and properties, especially those properties where change occurs slowly and affects soil fertility. Archived samples of all inputs and outputs are an invaluable source of material for future research, and data from current and archived samples can be used to develop models to describe soil and plant processes. Such changes and uses in the Rothamsted experiments are described, and demonstrate that with the appropriate crop, soil and management, acceptable yields can be maintained for many years, with either organic manure or inorganic fertilizers. Highlights Long‐term experiments demonstrate sustainability and increases in crop yield when managed to optimize soil fertility. Shifting individual response curves into coincidence increases understanding of the factors involved. Changes in inorganic and organic pollutants in archived crop and soil samples are related to inputs over time. Models describing soil processes are developed from current and archived soil data

Advances in ab-initio theory of Multiferroics. Materials and mechanisms: modelling and understanding

Within the broad class of multiferroics (compounds showing a coexistence of magnetism and ferroelectricity), we focus on the subclass of "improper electronic ferroelectrics", i.e. correlated materials where electronic degrees of freedom (such as spin, charge or orbital) drive ferroelectricity. In particular, in spin-induced ferroelectrics, there is not only a {\em coexistence} of the two intriguing magnetic and dipolar orders; rather, there is such an intimate link that one drives the other, suggesting a giant magnetoelectric coupling. Via first-principles approaches based on density functional theory, we review the microscopic mechanisms at the basis of multiferroicity in several compounds, ranging from transition metal oxides to organic multiferroics (MFs) to organic-inorganic hybrids (i.e. metal-organic frameworks, MOFs)Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure

Calculating the annual input of organic matter to soil from radiocarbon measurements

Measurements of total organic C, deltaC-13 and deltaC-14 are given for topsoils taken from six experimental sites in southern England. At each site, some of the samples were collected before and some after the thermonuclear tests of the early 1960s, so that pre- and post-bomb samples could be compared for radiocarbon content. The current Rothamsted model for the turnover of organic C in soil gave an acceptable fit to the data from five of the sites, apart from one aberrant radiocarbon measurement. The annual input of C to the topsoil was calculated for the five sites from these fits; the values obtained were: 0.15 t C ha-1 a-1 for a site on silty clay loam, kept bare by hand weeding since 1870; 0.2 for unmanured spring barley growing on a sandy loam; 2.95 for a fertilized all-arable rotation on a loamy sand; 1.9 for the same fertilized all-arable rotation on a silty loam and 2.5 from this rotation on a calcareous silty loam. The corresponding values for Net Primary Production at the five sites were 0.15, 0.76, 5.16, 5.71 and 5.46 t C ha-1 a-1. In fitting the model to the radiocarbon data it was necessary to postulate that all these sites contained substantial quantities of biologically-inert organic matter, ranging from 2.2 to 10.0 t C ha-1

A synthesis of postfire recovery traits of woody plants in Australian ecosystems

Postfire resprouting and recruitment from seed are key plant life-history traits that influence population dynamics, community composition and ecosystem function. Species can have one or both of these mechanisms. They confer resilience, which may determine community composition through differential species persistence after fire. To predict ecosystem level responses to changes in climate and fire conditions, we examined the proportions of these plant fire-adaptive traits among woody growth forms of 2880 taxa, in eight fire-prone ecosystems comprising ~. 87% of Australia's land area. Shrubs comprised 64% of the taxa. More tree (>. 84%) than shrub (~. 50%) taxa resprouted. Basal, epicormic and apical resprouting occurred in 71%, 22% and 3% of the taxa, respectively. Most rainforest taxa (91%) were basal resprouters. Many trees (59%) in frequently-burnt eucalypt forest and savanna resprouted epicormically. Although crown fire killed many mallee (62%) and heathland (48%) taxa, fire-cued seeding was common in these systems. Postfire seeding was uncommon in rainforest and in arid Acacia communities that burnt infrequently at low intensity. Resprouting was positively associated with ecosystem productivity, but resprouting type (e.g. basal or epicormic) was associated with local scale fire activity, especially fire frequency. Although rainforest trees can resprout they cannot recruit after intense fires and may decline under future fires. Semi-arid Acacia communities would be susceptible to increasing fire frequencies because they contain few postfire seeders. Ecosystems dominated by obligate seeders (mallee, heath) are also susceptible because predicted shorter inter-fire intervals will prevent seed bank accumulation. Savanna may be resilient to future fires because of the adaptive advantage of epicormic resprouting among the eucalypts. The substantial non-resprouting shrub component of shrublands may decline, but resilient Eucalyptus spp. will continue to dominate under future fire regimes. These patterns of resprouting and postfire seeding provide new insights to ecosystem assembly, resilience and vulnerability to changing fire regimes on this fire-prone continent

Appraising widespread resprouting but variable levels of postfire seeding in Australian ecosystems: The effect of phylogeny, fire regime and productivity

Postfire resprouting (R+) and recruitment from seed (S+) are common resilience traits in Australian ecosystems. We classified 2696 woody Australian taxa as R+ or not (R−) and as S+ or not (S−). The proportions of these traits in Australian ecosystems were examined in relation to fire regimes and other ecological correlates, and by trait mapping on a phylogeny scaled to time. Resprouting mapped as an ancestral trait. Postfire reseeding recruitment, while ancient, is more taxonomically restricted and has evolved independently several times. Nevertheless, both R+ and S+ are common in most clades, but negatively correlated at the ecosystem level indicating an evolutionary trade-off related to differences in the severity of fire regimes, determined in part by ecosystem productivity. Thus, R+ was associated with persistence in ecosystems characterised by higher productivity and relatively frequent surface fires of moderate to low severity (fire-productivity hypothesis). S+, the fire-stimulated recruitment by seed, occurred in ecosystems characterised by infrequent but intense crown-fire and topkill, reducing competition between postfire survivors and recruits (fire-resource-competition hypothesis). Consistently large proportions of R+ or S+ imply fire has been a pervasive evolutionary selection pressure resulting in highly fire-adapted and fire-resilient flora in most Australian ecosystems

Measurements of the three-dimensional structure of flames at low turbulence

The development of spark-ignited flame kernels in a turbulent field is strongly dependent upon the nature of the three-dimensional (3-D) turbulence adjacent to the ignition source. The turbulence scales vary in 3-D from shot to shot, resulting in successive flame kernels developing differently and thereby causing cyclic variations in, for example, spark ignition engines. It is necessary to quantify the scales affecting the flame at any instant for the accurate measurement of burn rate of such flame kernels, which requires visualization of the flame surface in 3-D. The experiments reported here employ a multiple sheet mie-scattered light technique to successfully characterize a nonstabilized expanding turbulent flame kernel in 3-D. A novel algorithm was developed to construct the flame surface in 3-D, which enabled accurate calculation of parameters such as flame surface density, reaction progress variables, and turbulent flame thickness