Biochar as a soil amendment has been regarded as a promising way to improve soil fertility. However, the response of microbial community after biochar and biochar compound fertilizer (BCF) application has not been thoroughly elucidated. This study evaluated the changes in abundance and composition of bacterial and fungal communities using quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) and Illumina MiSeq amplicon sequencing. The field experiment ran for 3 years and comprised five treatments: chemical fertilizer as control (CK), straw-returning combined with chemical fertilizer (CS), low biochar application combined with chemical fertilizer (LB), high biochar application combined with chemical fertilizer (HB) and BCF. The results showed that biochar amendment results no changes in the abundance and diversity of bacteria in the bulk and rhizosphere soils. However, the abundance of soil fungi was significantly increased by biochar amendment (LB and HB). LB treatment significantly increased the fungal alpha diversity, while there was no significant change under HB. Furthermore, the dominant bacterial phyla found in the samples were Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Acidobacteria. Biochar addition increased the relative abundance of Actinobacteria in both bulk and rhizosphere soils. The dominant fungal phyla were Ascomycota, Mortierellomycota, and Basidiomycota. The relative abundance of Ascomycota significantly decreased, but Mortierellomycota significantly increased in LB and HB. In addition, redundancy analysis indicated that the changes in bacterial and fungal communities are associated with soil properties such as SOC and TN, which are crucial contributors in regulating the community composition. This study is expected to provide significant theoretical and practical knowledge for the application of biochar in agricultural ecosystem.

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Owing to the outstanding sensing properties, especially high sensitivity and large stretchability, flexible piezoresistive strain sensors are advantageous for achieving intelligent sensing and have become a popular topic in the field of civil structural health monitoring (SHM). To explore advanced flexible strain sensors for civil SHM, this paper summarizes the recent research progress, achievements and challenges in flexible piezoresistive strain sensors. First, four common piezoresistive mechanisms are introduced theoretically. Sensor materials, including conductive materials, flexible substrates and electrodes, are explained in detail. Second, essential sensing parameters are interpreted and then followed by specific explanations of improvement strategies for the sensor performance in terms of each parameter. Third, applications of flexible piezoresistive strain sensors in the deformation measurement and damage detection of steel structures, concrete structures and fiber-reinforced composite structures are presented. Existing challenges and prospects in the practical application and large-scale production of flexible strain sensors are also reported. Last but not least, strategies for the selection of piezoresistive sensors for civil SHM are explained.

Zero-valent iron/activated carbon (Fe/C) particles can degrade persistent organic pollutants via micro-electrolysis and therefore, they may be used to develop materials for permeable reactive barriers (PRBs). In this study, surfactant-enhanced electrokinetics (EK) was coupled with a Fe/C-PRB to treat phenanthrene (PHE) and 2,4,6-trichlorophenol (TCP) co-contaminated clay soil. An environment-friendly biosurfactant, rhamnolipid, was selected as the solubility-enhancing agent. Five bench-scale tests were conducted to investigate the performance of EK-PRB on PHE and TCP removal from soil as well as the impact of pH and rhamnolipid concentration. The results show that both PHE and TCP, driven by electro-osmotic flow (EOF), moved toward the cathode and reacted with the Fe/C-PRB. Catholyte acidification and rhamnolipid concentration increase improved the removal efficiencies of PHE and TCP. The highest removal efficiency of PHE in soil column was five times the efficiency of the control group on which only EK was applied (49.89 versus 9.40%). The highest removal efficiency of TCP in soil column was 4.5 times the efficiency of the control group (64.60 versus 14.30%). Desorption and mobility of PHE and TCP improved with the increase of rhamnolipid concentration when this exceeded the critical micelle concentration. This study indicates that the combination of EK and a Fe/C-PRB is efficient and promising for removing persistent organic pollutants (POPs) from contaminated soil with the enhancement of rhamnolipid.

Accurate measurement of dynamic displacement is important for the structural health monitoring and safety assessment of supertall structures. However, the displacement of a supertall structure is difficult to be accurately measured using the conventional methods because they are either inaccurate or inconvenient to be set up in practice. This study provides an accurate and economical method to measure dynamic displacement of supertall structures accurately by fusing acceleration and strain data, which are generally available in the structural health monitoring system. Dynamic displacement is first derived from the measured longitudinal strains based on geometric deformation without requiring mode shapes. An optimization technique is utilized to optimize the deployment of strain sensors for achieving more accurate strain-derived displacement. The strain-derived displacement is then combined with measured acceleration via a multi-rate Kalman filtering approach. Applications to a numerical supertall structure and a laboratory cantilever beam verify that the proposed method accurately estimates displacement including both high-frequency and pseudo-static components, under different noise cases and sampling rates. A full-scale field test on the 600 m-high Canton Tower is implemented to validate the applicability of the proposed method to real supertall structures. Error analysis demonstrates that the data fusion displacement is more accurate than the global position system-measured displacement in the time and frequency domains.

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Plant root‐associated microbial communities profoundly affect plant nutrition and productivity. Although elevated atmospheric CO2 and warming affect above‐ and belowground plant processes, it remains unclear how root‐associated microbial communities respond to elevated CO2 and warming. In this study, an open‐air field experiment was conducted to assay the interactive effects of elevated CO2 (500 ppm) and warming (+2°C) on the root‐associated microbiota and soil enzyme activities in a rice–wheat rotation ecosystem. The results revealed that elevated CO2 significantly increased rhizosphere soil organic carbon (SOC) and total nitrogen contents. In addition, glucosidase, β‐xylosidase, and phosphatase activities significantly increased. The richness and Shannon diversity indices were significantly higher in rhizosphere soil than in root endosphere. Elevated CO2 and warming significantly impacted the rhizosphere soil microbiota and altered their composition by changing the relative abundance of some specific groups. Soil pH, SOC, and available potassium content significantly altered the dominant bacterial phyla in the rhizosphere. SOC affected root endophytic bacterial phyla. Bacterial and fungal genera were significantly correlated with soil variables in the rhizosphere than in the root endosphere. These results indicate that microbial communities in the rhizosphere are more sensitive to elevated CO2 and warming than those in the root endosphere.

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