Accurate simulation of agricultural management effects on N loss in tile drainage is vitally important for understanding hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. An experimental study was initiated in 1978 at Nashua, Iowa of the USA to study long-term effects of tillage, crop rotation, and N management practices on subsurface drainage flow and associated N losses. The Root Zone Water Quality Model (RZWQM...

Assessment of soil and vegetation properties is one of the main objectives of radar remote-sensing applications. The parameters of soil dielectric constant, crop height and extinction coefficient etc are very important for planning of earth resource utilization and the prediction of environmental changes. Although, a lot of work has been already done in this direction, no robust operational met...

In the semi-arid tropics (SAT), 33% areas are occupied by Alfisols and related soils. In SAT these soils have low structural stability and thereby tend to form seal and crusts at the surface. Due to this a large proportion of the rain that falls on Alfisols during the early part of the rainy season, is normally lost as runoff thus causing high soil loss as well as moisture stress to crops. Two ...

Crop acreage assessment is of particular importance in China where total crop land area is shrinking following the urbanization, directly threatening the policy of grain self-sufficiency. This study demonstrated the application potential of remote sensing to estimate large crop areas on the North China Plain (NCP). The cropping pattern in this plain comprises two growth seasons per year. The ha...

This review analyzes the potential role and long-term effects of field perennial polycultures (mixtures) in agricultural systems, with the aim of reducing the trade-offs between provisioning and regulating ecosystem services. First, crop rotations are identified as a suitable tool for the assessment of the long-term effects of perennial polycultures on ecosystem services, which are not visible ...

Increasing concerns about the environmental impacts of herbicides, the development of herbicide-resistant weeds, and the need to carefully weigh costs and benefits have led to greater interest in developing rational, economical, and sustainable approaches to weed management (O'Donovan 1996). In addition, greater emphasis on post-emergence applied herbicides such as glyphosate has allowed for mo...

Precision agriculture is defined as the observation, impact assessment, and the timely strategic response for remedy to minute variation in agricultural production [1]. Precision agriculture is applied in a wide range of agricultural activities such as crop production, dairy farming, horticulture, and forest management. Site-specific crop management (SSCM) is one important component of precisio...

Over the years, modeling has become an integral part of plant disease epidemiology (or botanical epidemiology). As in other fields of research, modeling in plant disease epidemiology may serve very different purposes, including: synthesizing available data on epidemiological processes; predicting epidemiological patterns; developing a conceptual framework that captures available data; organizin...