There is an emerging recognition that invasibility is not an intrinsic community trait, but is a condition that fluctuates from interactions between environmental forces and residential characters. Elucidating the spatiotemporal complexities of invasion requires inclusion of multiple, ecologically variable factors within communities of differing structure. Water and nutrient amendments, disturbance, and local composition affect grassland invasibility but no study has simultaneously integrated these, despite evidence that they frequently interact. Using a split-plot factorial design, we tested the effects of these factors on the invasibility of C3 pasture communities by smooth pigweed Amaranthus hybridus L., a problematic C4 forb. We sowed seeds and transplanted 3-week old seedlings of A. hybridus into plots containing monocultures and mixtures of varying composition, subjected plots to water, soil disturbance, and synthetic bovine urine (SBU) treatments, and measured A. hybridus emergence, recruitment, and growth rate. Following SBU addition, transplanted seedling growth increased in all plots but differed among legume and nonlegume monocultures and mixtures of these plant types. However, SBU decreased the number and recruitment rate of emerged seedlings because high residential growth reduced light availability. Nutrient pulses can therefore have strong but opposing effects on invasibility, depending on when they coincide with particular life history stages of an invader. Indeed, in SBU-treated plots, small differences in height of transplanted seedlings early on produced large differences in their final biomass. All facilitative effects of small-scale disturbance on invasion success diminished when productivity-promoting factors were present, suggesting that disturbance patch size is important. Precipitation-induced invasion resistance of C3 pastures by a C4 invader was partly supported. In grazed grasslands, these biotic and environmental factors vary across scales and interact in complex ways to affect invasibility, thus a dynamic patch mosaic of differential invasion resistance likely occurs in single fields. We propose that disturbance patch size, grazing intensity, soil resource availability, and resident composition are inextricably linked to grassland invasions and comment on the utility of community attributes as reliable predictors of invasibility. Lastly, we suggest temporal as well as spatial coincidences of multiple invasion facilitators dictate the window of opportunity for invasion.

Resumo -O objetivo deste trabalho foi avaliar o efeito da variabilidade do pH e da matéria orgânica de um Latossolo Vermelho distrófico, textura argilosa, sob diferentes manejos na retenção do herbicida imazaquin. A retenção deste herbicida foi medida pelo coeficiente de partição solo-água (K d ) em amostras de solos coletados na camada superficial (0-15 cm) em área de 38 ha, sob irrigação com pivô central e plantio direto e convencional. A retenção do imazaquin foi maior nas áreas com menores valores de pH e altos teores de matéria orgânica, ou seja, nas áreas onde o plantio direto foi utilizado por longo tempo. O pH afetou a retenção do imazaquin por controlar tanto a natureza iônica dos componentes do solo, matéria orgânica e minerais de argila, quanto a sua especiação. O teor de argila não apresentou variação na área estudada, ou seja, não afetou a retenção do imazaquin. O modelo de predição da sorção do imazaquin no solo pela análise de regressão multivariada com duas variáveis independentes (teor de matéria orgânica e pH) apresentou boa correlação (R 2 = 0,91).Termos para indexação: imidazolinona, agricultura de precisão, matéria orgânica, pH, plantio convencional. Imazaquin herbicide sorption by an Oxisol with till and no-till managementAbstract -The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of spatial variation of pH and organic matter of a Dark Red soil, under different managements, on imazaquin herbicide sorption. Soil-water sorption partitioning coefficient (K d ) was used in surface soil samples collected at 0-15 cm layer in a 38 ha area, under central pivot irrigation and with till and no-till management. Herbicide sorption was most strongly related to soil organic matter content and pH, revealing greatest sorption in lower pH values with greater soil organic matter content. These samples were collected at no-till management area. The pH effects on imazaquin retention occur either by controlling the organic matter ionization form as also its speciation. The clay content in the whole area had no variation, however, it didn't affect the K d values. Using multivariate regression and two independent variables (soil organic matter content and pH), the prediction of herbicide sorption by soil was good (R 2 = 0.91).

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Regressions such as Grain yield=f(soil,landscape) are frequently reported in precision agriculture research, and are typically computed using conventional OLS methods, implicitly ignoring spatial correlation of the residuals. This oversight can have a marked effect on the final conclusions derived from these regressions. A further issue is, which approach should be used to account for this problem? We investigated this question using a 2 year data set that includes sitespecific soil and topographic information and soybean yields and compare regression results from direct covariance representation and spatial autoregressive approaches. Our results show that the coefficients from both spatial approaches are in many cases significantly different to those from OLS, but the estimates from both spatial approaches appear to show little differences. To provide further insight into the comparison among these approaches we use a simulation of spatial random fields, with a model containing 2 independent explanatory variables and a spatially structured residual term. We then estimated the coefficients for 1000 simulations of this field and assessed their distributional properties. All methods yielded overall unbiased estimates and OLS showed the largest standard errors, while the 'spatial' approaches proved to be relatively consistent, although a certain neighborhood specification within the spatial autoregressive model had an evidently lower performance than the rest.

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