Cover Crops and Soil Ecosystem Services (ePub)

Cover Crops and Soil Ecosystem Services

A comprehensive resource on cover crops and their role in soil ecosystems

Cover crops are a reemerging strategy to improve and maintain the services that soils provide. They can have an enormous affect on agricultural outcomes, preventing soil erosion, restoring vital soil nutrients, sequestering C from the atmosphere, and more. The successful management and use of cover crops is therefore critical to ensure soil ecosystem services are maintained or improved not only to meet our demands for food, fuel, fiber, and feed but also to reduce pollution and improve the soil.

Cover Crops and Soil Ecosystem Services provides a heavily researched and highly readable introduction to cover crops and their role in soil ecosystems. It ranges from a detailed discussion of cover crop biomass production to a thorough treatment of soil ecosystems and their vulnerabilities. The result is an essential guide to a critical area of agricultural science.

Cover Crops and Soil Ecosystem Services readers will also find:

* Detailed treatment of cover crop biomass production, soil erosion, greenhouse gas fluxes, nitrate leaching, soil C sequestration, and more

* Discussion of emerging issues, including extreme weather events and the economics of cover crop farming

* Wide-ranging summaries of interdisciplinary soil and cover crop research

Cover Crops and Soil Ecosystem Services is a useful reference for students and researchers at all levels of study relating to cover crop agriculture.