On-Farm nutrient balance assessment to improve nutrient management on organic dairy farms

A survey is presented on the impact of different intensities of grassland management related to nutrient balances and their assessment. With special reference to data from Austria and Germany, it is postulated that on-farm nutrient balance assessment is a valuable tool for identifying deficits in efficiency of nutrient use in the soil-plant-animal system. Farm gate balances can be used as indicators for Codes of Good Agricultural Practice in Europe, if input/output parameters and calculations are standardised and if acceptable surpluses are regionally validated

Composition and activity of nitrifier communities in soil are unresponsive to elevated temperature and CO2, but strongly affected by drought

Nitrification is a fundamental process in terrestrial nitrogen cycling. However, detailed information on how climate change affects the structure of nitrifier communities is lacking, specifically from experiments in which multiple climate change factors are manipulated simultaneously. Consequently, our ability to predict how soil nitrogen (N) cycling will change in a future climate is limited. We conducted a field experiment in a managed grassland and simultaneously tested the effects of elevated atmospheric CO2, temperature, and drought on the abundance of active ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and archaea (AOA), comammox (CMX) Nitrospira, and nitrite-oxidizing bacteria (NOB), and on gross mineralization and nitrification rates. We found that N transformation processes, as well as gene and transcript abundances, and nitrifier community composition were remarkably resistant to individual and interactive effects of elevated CO2 and temperature. During drought however, process rates were increased or at least maintained. At the same time, the abundance of active AOB increased probably due to higher NH4+ availability. Both, AOA and comammox Nitrospira decreased in response to drought and the active community composition of AOA and NOB was also significantly affected. In summary, our findings suggest that warming and elevated CO2 have only minor effects on nitrifier communities and soil biogeochemical variables in managed grasslands, whereas drought favors AOB and increases nitrification rates. This highlights the overriding importance of drought as a global change driver impacting on soil microbial community structure and its consequences for N cycling

QUARK AND DIQUARK FRAGMENTATION INTO NEUTRAL STRANGE PARTICLES AS OBSERVED IN MUON - PROTON INTERACTIONS AT 280-GeV

The production of K0s, Λs and Λs has been studied in a 280 GeV muon-proton scattering experiment with almost complete coverage of all kinematic regions. A study is made of the dependence of the multiplicities on the hadronic centre of mass energy, W, and of the Feynman x distributions. It is found that K0 and Λ production is mostly central and increases strongly with W, whereas Λ production comes mainly from the remnant target system and is only weakly W dependent. © 1984

THE VERTEX AND LARGE ANGLE DETECTORS OF A SPECTROMETER SYSTEM FOR HIGH-ENERGY MUON PHYSICS

A description is given of the detector system which forms the large angle spectrometer and vertex detector of the EMC (European Muon Collaboration) spectrometer. The apparatus is used in the NA9 experiment which studies the complete hadronic final state from the interaction of high energy muons