Cover crops (CC) improve soil quality, including soil microbial enzymatic activities and soil chemical parameters. Scientific studies conducted in research centers have shown positive effects of CC on soil enzymatic activities; however, studies conducted in farmer fields are lacking in the literature. The objective of this study was to quantify CC effects on soil microbial enzymatic activities (β-glucosidase, β-glucosaminidase, fluorescein diacetate hydrolase, and dehydrogenase) under a corn (Zea mays L.)–soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) rotation. The study was conducted in 2016 and 2018 in Chariton County, Missouri, where CC were first established in 2012. All tested soil enzyme levels were significantly different between 2016 and 2018, irrespective of CC and no cover crop (NCC) treatments. In CC treatment, β-glucosaminidase activity was significantly greater at 0–10 cm depth in 2016 and at 10–20 and 20–30 cm in 2018. In contrast, dehydrogenase activity was significantly greater in NCC in 2018. Soil pH and organic matter (OM) content were found to be significantly greater in CC. Overall, CC have mixed effects on soil enzyme activities and positive effects on soil OM compared to NCC. This study highlights the short-term influence of CC and illustrates the high spatial and temporal variability of soil enzymes under farmer-managed fields.
Gypseous soils are common in several regions in the world including Iraq, where more than 28.6% of its surface is covered with this type of soil. This soil, with high gypsum content, causes different problems for construction and strategic projects. As a result of water flow through the soil mass, the permeability and chemical arrangement of these soils varies with time due to the solubility and leaching of gypsum. In this study, the soil of 36% gypsum content, was taken from one location about 100 km southwest of Baghdad, where the samples were taken from depths (0.5 - 1) m below the natural ground and mixed with (3%, 6%, 9%) of Copolymer and Novolac polymer to improve the engineering properties that include: collapsibility, perm
... Show MoreIn this research, the geotechnical properties of the soil profile in Hilla city within Babylon Governorate in the middle parts of Iraq are described. The geotechnical data at the specific sites were collected from some geotechnical investigation reports performed at some selected locations. This article is devoted to studying the distribution of soil properties (the physical and mechanical) in the horizontal and vertical directions. Moreover, a correlation between different physical and mechanical properties is performed. The correlation is executed using statistical analysis by Microsoft Excel Software (2016). From the regression results, it was found that the nature of the soil is c
The dynamic response of foundation rest on collapsible soil in dry and soaked states is studied through wide experimental programmed. Gypseous soil from Tikrit governorate area was obtained and subjected to various physical and chemical analysis to determine its properties. Steel rectangular footing (400x200x20) mm is manufactured. The machine is fitted to the footing, then the model machine foundation is placed centrally over the prepared soil layer in steel container (1200x 1000x1000)mm with proper care to maintain the center of gravity of whole system lie in the same vertical line with container.Then, the footing is subjected to vertical harmonic loading using a rotating mass type mechanical oscillator to simulate different dynamic lo
... Show MoreThe study is devoted to both static and earthquake response analysis of retaining structures acted upon by lateral earth pressure. Two main approaches were implemented in the analysis, namely, the Mononobe-Okabe analytical method and the numerical Finite element procedure as provided in the ready software ABAQUS with explicit dynamic method. A basic case study considered in the present work is the bridge approach retaining walls as a part of AL-Jadiriya bridge intersection to obtain the effects of the backfill and the ground water on the retaining wall response including displacement of the retaining structure in addition to the behavior of the fill material. Parametric studies were carried out to evaluate the effects of several factors
... Show MoreIn this paper, a shallow foundation (strip footing), 1 m in width is assumed to be constructed on fully saturated and partially saturated Iraqi soils, and analyzed by finite element method. A procedure is proposed to define the H – modulus function from the soil water characteristic curve which is measured by the filter paper method. Fitting methods are applied through the program (SoilVision). Then, the soil water characteristic curve is converted to relation correlating the void ratio and matric suction. The slope of the latter relation can be used to define the H – modulus function. The finite element programs SIGMA/W and SEEP/W are then used in the analysis. Eight nodded isoparametric quadrilateral elements are used for modeling
... Show MoreLeap Motion Controller (LMC) is a gesture sensor consists of three infrared light emitters and two infrared stereo cameras as tracking sensors. LMC translates hand movements into graphical data that are used in a variety of applications such as virtual/augmented reality and object movements control. In this work, we intend to control the movements of a prosthetic hand via (LMC) in which fingers are flexed or extended in response to hand movements. This will be carried out by passing in the data from the Leap Motion to a processing unit that processes the raw data by an open-source package (Processing i3) in order to control five servo motors using a micro-controller board. In addition, haptic setup is proposed using force sensors (F
... Show MoreMost of the medical datasets suffer from missing data, due to the expense of some tests or human faults while recording these tests. This issue affects the performance of the machine learning models because the values of some features will be missing. Therefore, there is a need for a specific type of methods for imputing these missing data. In this research, the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is used for generating and imputing the missing values in the pain in my ass (also known Pima) Indian diabetes disease (PIDD) dataset, the proposed algorithm is called (ISSA). The obtained results showed that the classification performance of three different classifiers which are support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbour (KNN), and Naïve B
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