Search

The article highlights Public Regulation of Non-Commercial Speech in the U.S. and Great Britain. Topics discussed include the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the case "Reed v. Town of Gilbert;" the U.S. Constitution's broad provisions of the First Amendment prohibiting regulation of free speech; and ways in which First Amendment was also hostile to differential treatment among various categories of noncommercial speech.

The article focuses on several studies being conducted by scientists at the U.S. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) to help determine how much corn stover can be harvested without increasing erosion or hampering the soil's ability to build organic matter and sequester carbon. John M. Baker, Rodney Venterea, and Tyson E. Ochsner are experimenting with winter cover crops and living mulches as possible ways to harvest biomass without jeopardizing soil health or productivity. Jane M.F. Johnson and Don Reicosky established experimental plots and on-farm trials to find a balance between stover used for protecting the soil and stover used for bioenergy. Shannon L. Osborne leads a longterm study initially designed to examine the impact of removing corn stover on soil quality.

The primary objective of this study was to clarify the influence of crop plants on atmospheric methane (CH) in an agriculture-dominated landscape in the Upper Midwest of the United States. Measurements were carried out at two contrasting scales. At the plant scale, CH fluxes from soybean and corn plants were measured with a laser-based plant chamber system. At the landscape scale, the land surface flux was estimated with a modified Bowen ratio technique using measurements made on a tall tower. The chamber data revealed a diurnal pattern for the plant CH flux: it was positive (an emission rate of 0.4 ± 0.1 nmol m s, average of soybean and corn, in reference to the unit ground area) during the day, and negative (an uptake rate of −0.8 ± 0.8 nmol m s) during the night. At the landscape scale, the flux was estimated to be 14.8 nmol m s at night and highly uncertain during the day, but the available references and the flux estimates from the equilibrium methods suggested that the CH flux during the entire observation period was similar to the estimated nighttime flux. Thus, soybean and corn plants have a negligible role in the landscape-scale CH budget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]