The paper shows soil organic carbon sequestration (SOC) rates in calcareous shallow soils in reforested areas in the Tatra Mts., with a particular focus on the different forms of organic matter (OM) storage. Fifty years after the conversion of pastureland to grassland, the emergence of dwarf pine shrub, larch forest, the development of genetic soil horizons as well as SOC sequestration and the occurrence of OM forms in soil, are related to plant community.

We present a data-processing routine for robust measurements of relative arrival times of P and S waves, filtered in different frequency bands and recorded at regional networks of seismological stations. We also analyse the influence of crustal structure on the arrival times of P and S waves, and find that arrival times are generally different in different frequency bands in the presence of sedimentary layers. These findings are illustrated using data from southwestern Scandinavia.

Due to a thermal insulation effect of oceanic crust, the seafloor heat flux is predicted to be low over young lithosphere (compared to other cooling models). Consequently, the amount of heat extracted from oceanic lithosphere by ventilated hydrothermal circulation is predicted to be significantly lower than previous models. About 50% of total hydrothermal power is extracted on ridge axes.

The higher soil moisture content among different land uses was exhibited by the grassland, and followed by cropland, poplar land, inter-dunes and shrub land. The temporal variations of soil moisture in different land uses were not always consistent with the rainfall due to the dry sequence. The infiltration depth exhibited a positive correlation with precipitation under all land uses. This study provided an insight into the implications for land and agricultural water management in this area.

In this paper, the 3-D density structure of the Costa Rican subduction zone is modeled by means of interactive forward modeling of gravity data. The geometry of the subduction zone is constrained, among other geophysical data, by relocated earthquake hypocenters, taking into account intermediate depth seismicity which provides new information on the plate interface. In the preferred model, the presence of a continuous, steeply subducting slab is interpreted for SE Costa Rica.

This study evaluated trends in vegetation cover and phenology dynamics in the Inner Mongolia grassland by applying a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series obtained by the Terra Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) during 2002–2014. The positive trends of the cumulative annual NDVI (77.10%) could be interpreted as an increase in plant productivity in the Inner Mongolia permanent grassland. And the growing season has lengthened by 10.86 days.

Grazing exclusion has been widely adopted to restore degraded grasslands in Tibet. We investigated soil properties and nutrients by comparing free-grazing and grazing exclusion grasslands. The results showed that grazing exclusion had no impact on most soil properties and nutrients, and even caused a considerable decrease in soil TN and TP in the soil surface layer. Nevertheless, climate conditions during the growing season played an important role in controlling the soil quality status.

When magma chambers inflate, they deform the surrounding Earth’s crust. This deformation affects the pore space available for the water in local aquifers, which in turn leads to pressure variations and water table changes. We can observe these changes in wells, and this study investigates if and how we can utilize them for volcano monitoring. Results show that the hydrological response to deformation helps unravelling subsurface magmatic processes, valuable information for eruption forecasting.

We investigated environmental factors and plant functional groups to quantity and identify factors during alpine grassland succession processes. The degree of degradation of alpine meadows may be delineated by development of mattic epipedon and PFG composition. Because relatively few environmental factors are investigated, this approach can save time and labor to formulate a conservation management plan for degraded alpine meadows.

The paper presents a simple and novel approach to prioritize districts (or subregions) of a state (or region) for implementing soil conservation measures through computation of weighted soil erosion risk (WSER), by deducting soil loss tolerance limit values from soil erosion rates. WSER values obtained for the districts of Telangana state, India, led us to identify Adilabad, Warangal, and Khammam as the districts calling for the urgent attention of policymakers for natural resource conservation.

This paper discusses an integrated approach that provides new ideas about the structure of the eastern Coastal Cordillera in the western Central Andes of northern Chile (27º–28ºS). The integration of gravity and geological information shows that the architecture of this sector is related to the inversion of a Cretaceous rift system. Ages of the synorogenic deposits exposed unconformably over the inversion structure have confirmed a Late Cretaceous age for the Andean deformation in the region.

In this paper we analyse the seismic record during the extrusion of a lava spine at Unzen volcano, Japan, in 1994. We find two strong groups of similar volcanic earthquakes which, combined with previously published field and experimental observations, we interpret as repetitive fracturing along the margin of the lava spine. This work demonstrates the potential of combining these different approaches for achieving a greater understanding of shallow volcanic processes.