Thermodynamic entropy was initially proposed by Clausius in 1865. Since then it has been implemented in the analysis of different systems, and is seen as a promising concept to understand the evolution of open systems in non-equilibrium conditions. I...
Earth’s critical zone is the physical layer contained between the top of the vegetation canopy and the depth of the circulating groundwater below the land surface. The critical zone is defined within the study of Earth natural sciences as the u...
The critical zone (CZ) represents the most-shallow subsurface, where the bio-, hydro-, and geospheres interact with anthropogenic activity. To characterize the thickness and lateral variations of the CZ, here we focus on the Eastern Betic Shear Zone...
Owing to active orogenic movement and the monsoon climate, rainfall-induced landslide disasters often occur in Taiwan. Hence, hillslope hydrology and stability have received considerable research attention. However, it remains difficult to accurately...
Koiliaris CZO is a European Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) typical of the Mediterranean karstic geomorphology, which represents watersheds affected by humans over the centuries. This study aims to provide information that underpins the hydrologic an...
Imidacloprid (IDP) products are applied via soil drenching in the citrus critical root zone (CCRZ) at 0–60 cm soil depth. This study aimed to determine the uptake and leaching of IDP in the CCRZ of a Florida Entisol. The treatments include: (1)...
The hydrology of alpine and subalpine areas in the Colorado Front Range (USA) is evolving, driven by warming and by the alteration of precipitation patterns, the timing of snowmelt, and other components of the hydrologic budget. Field measurements of...
The Gully Consolidation and Highland Protection (GCHP) project (such as for gully head landfills), a consideration of soil and water conservation measures, has been explored and developed continuously in recent decades in the Chinese Loess Plateau. U...
Accurate division of the water-conducting fracturing zone (WCFZ) in the mining overburden serves as an important basis to evaluate the stability of coal mining under water bodies. Research on the WCFZ is conducive to controlling surface subsidence an...
The aims of agricultural land management change continuously, reflecting shifts in wider societal priorities. Currently, these include addressing the climate crisis, promoting environmental sustainability, and supporting the livelihoods of rural comm...
Soil samples from eight soil profiles under different land-use types were collected at the Puding Karst Critical Zone Observatory, Southwest China, to investigate the distribution, fractionation, and controlling factors of rare earth elements (REEs)....
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The development of Earth’s critical zone concept has strengthened the capacity of environmental science to better solve real-world problems, such as metal(loid) pollution in the remote alpine areas. The selected metal(loid) contents in soil, mo...
Background/Objectives: Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) surgery can lead to postoperative stress urinary incontinence (SUI) in previously continent women, termed de novo SUI. This study assessed the incidence and risk factors of de novo SUI after apical P...
The geochemical and mineralogical characteristics of pelagic sediments collected from the Interoceanmetal Joint Organization (IOM) claim area, located in the eastern part of the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCFZ; eastern tropical Pacific), are d...
The effects of the unpredictability of the flow system in a karst area, with respect to bacterial communities in the aquatic environment, were evaluated. Bacterial communities from two different types of flow conditions (spring and sinkhole) were cha...
Measuring the mechanical properties of weld Heat Affected Zone (HAZ) remains one of the main challenges in the failure analysis of spot-welded components. Due to the small size of the HAZ and variation in the temperature history, different peak tempe...
Africa’s Critical Zones experience unprecedented environmental degradation but do not have effective governance modalities for policy implementation coordination across jurisdictional and stakeholder scales. This study addresses three specific...
Deep-sea Fe-Mn polymetallic nodules formed nowadays at the deep-sea ocean floor were evaluated as promising critical raw materials (CRMs). Here, we report results of polymetallic nodules from the H22_NE block of the Interoceanmetal (IOM) exploration...
Controlling access to critical zones by drones is crucial for ensuring safety and efficient operations in various applications. In this research, we propose a strategy for controlling the access of a set of drones to a critical zone using timed autom...
The seismic performance of a structural frame system can be enhanced by strengthening the RC beams’ critical zones. In this paper is presented an experimental study on the improvement of the beam behaviour, subjected to an alternative cyclic pr...
Land-use conflicts (LUCs) are pivotal in assessing human–land interaction, reflecting the intricate interplay between natural and anthropogenic drivers. However, existing studies often overlook nuanced non-linear responses and critical threshol...
Groundwater is one of the major sources of water supply for human needs. But anthropic activities such as agriculture are causing significant volume depletion and quality deterioration, favoring microbial contamination that has a negative impact on h...
Cave systems serve as key interfaces connecting surface and underground carbon cycles, and research on their carbon dynamics provides a unique perspective for revealing the mechanisms of carbon transport and transformation in karst critical zones. In...
Manganese (Mn) is an essential micronutrient for plants, which influences multiple physiological systems. Determination of the critical limit (CL) of Mn in the soil is necessary for Mn fertilizer application as this limit delineates the deficiency, o...
The complexity of construction in prefabricated buildings makes it vulnerable to uncertainty in project timelines, and traditional project timeline management is insufficient to control project timelines for prefabricated buildings. Therefore, resear...
We studied the effects of peak temperature and cooling rate in the secondary welding thermal cycles on the martensite/austenite (M/A) constituents’ characteristics (including fraction, average size and distribution), corrosion resistance and hy...
Springs are crucial interfaces within the Earth’s Critical Zone, connecting water and its related matter and energy at different scales from the microscopic to the macroscopic level. This connectivity is of importance for habitat conditions and the i...
Background: Sagittal alignment in the lumbar spine is essential for spinal stability and functionality, with significant implications in surgical planning for spinal deformity correction. However, standardized lumbar partitioning, particularly identi...
This study presents classification and prediction exercises to evaluate the future behavior of nitrogen dioxide in a critical air quality zone located in Portugal using a dataset, the time span of which covers the period between 1 September 2021 and...
Observing state variables, fluxes, and key properties in terrestrial ecosystems should not be seen as disjointed, but rather as fruitfully complementary to ecosystem dynamics modeling. This intertwined view should also take the organization of the mo...
We explore the localization properties of a double-stranded ladder within a tight-binding framework where the site energies of different lattice sites are distributed in the cosine form following the Aubry–André–Harper (AAH) model....
Analytical solutions for turbulent and laminar water flow conditions are developed considering the drainage process of a simple tank reservoir, using the Darcy–Weisbach and the Poiseuille laws, respectively. Near the critical value of the Reyno...
High-resolution mineral characterization performed on mine material from a giant porphyry copper deposit shows that critical and precious metals, such as cobalt, lanthanum, gold, silver, and tellurium, are concentrated in pyrite in the form of visibl...
To improve production efficiency and prevent potential disasters in coal mines, comprehensive research methods such as similar simulation, numerical simulation, theoretical analysis, and on-site detection were used in this study. The migration charac...
The First Joint Meeting on Soil and Plant System Sciences (SPSS 2019), titled “Natural and Human-Induced Impacts on the Critical Zone and Food Production”, aimed at integrating different scientific backgrounds and topics flowing into the...
The primary purpose of the current investigation was to perform an intensity distribution analysis of a collegiate cross-country (CC) competition, with a secondary purpose to compare race times (RT) with modeled performance times (MPT). Participants...
Earth’s critical zone is defined as a plant–soil–water system, which covers a wide area and has a large vertical thickness, but the soil elemental stoichiometry characteristics of the critical zone at different depths are still uncl...
In this article we address the issue of how an instrumental approach to sustainability education has dominated the scientific debate of the last 20 years. By conducting interviews and focus group interviews, we have investigated a community arts init...
Roof water inrush accidents in coal mine driving roadways occur frequently in China, accounting for a high proportion of major coal mine water hazard accidents and causing serious losses. Aiming at the lack of research on the mechanism of roof water...
Intensive vegetable production has been characterized by high nitrogen (N) fertilizer input in southwest China. Optimizing the N fertilizer rate is the basis for the optimal management of regional N fertilizer. A two-year field experiment with five N...
Situated in the southern hilly-mountain belt of China’s “Three Zones and Four Belts Strategy”, Gannan region is a critical ecological shelter belt for the Ganjiang River. Decades of intensive mineral extraction and irrational agricu...
Soil carbon and nitrogen storage and stabilization are the key to solving the problems of mitigation of global warming and maintaining of crop productivity. In this study, the contents of soil organic carbon (SOC) and soil organic nitrogen (SON) and...
In this study, we compared traditional lithochemical sample media (soil) with hydrochemical (groundwater), biogeochemical (plant matter of mulga and spinifex), and other near-surface sample media (ferro-manganese crust), in a case study applied to mi...
Background and Objectives: Different arthroscopic procedures are used for partial-thickness rotator cuff tears (PT-RCTs), but there is still no evidence on the superiority of one procedure over the other. The aim of this study was to evaluate the cli...
The simple leaves of deciduous forest trees in temperate zones have more irregular and asymmetric shapes than comparable non-deciduous leaves of trees in the tropics and subtropics. These shapes manifest as the irregular lobes and sinuses of temperat...
This review compiles publicly available datasets describing the chemical composition of geothermal fluids from eight wells in the Taupo Volcanic Zone (TVZ) and Ngāwhā, New Zealand. Our review allows previously reported geothermal reservoir...
The critical limit for zinc (Zn) varies from 0.38 to 2 µg/g soil depending on the crop and soil type. However, the critical limit for Zn was not explored recently for rice and potato cultivation in the floodplain soils of Bangladesh. A pot expe...
Rocky desertification is a common phenomenon in karst areas. Soil carbon and nitrogen storage is of great significance to the formation and evolution of ecosystems. Soil leakage is one of the important indicators in evaluating ecosystem stability. Th...
The subzones of the intercritical heat-affected zone (IC HAZ) of low-carbon bainitic steel were simulated by using a Gleeble-3500 simulator to study the impact toughness. The results showed that the IC HAZ is not entirely brittle and can be further d...
Hydrological variations hold a significant influence over the water chemistry in the karst systems within the critical zone. In this context, the Baget Catchment (BC) was monitored at high-resolution over 2 hydrological years. The high-frequency surv...
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