Areas and spatial distribution information of paddy rice are important for managing food security, water use, and climate change. However, there are many difficulties in mapping paddy rice, especially mapping multi-season paddy rice in rainy regions, including differences in phenology, the influence of weather, and farmland fragmentation. To resolve these problems, a novel multi-season paddy ri...

Rice is one of the major crops cultivated predominantly in flooded paddies, thus a large amount of water is consumed during its growing season. Accurate paddy rice maps are therefore important inputs for improved estimates of actual evapotranspiration in the agricultural landscape. The main objective of this study was to obtain flooded paddy rice maps using multi-temporal images of Moderate Res...

Drought stress has often caused significant decreases in crop production which could be associated with global warming. Enhancing drought tolerance without a grain yield penalty has been a great challenge in crop improvement. Here, we report the Arabidopsis thaliana galactinol synthase 2 gene (AtGolS2) was able to confer drought tolerance and increase grain yield in two different rice (Oryza sa...

Mycotoxin contamination in rice is less reported, compared to that in wheat or maize, however, some Fusarium fungi occasionally infect rice in the paddy field. Fumonisins are mycotoxins mainly produced by Fusarium verticillioides, which often ruins maize. Rice adherent fungus Gibberella fujikuroi is taxonomically near to F. verticillioides, and there are sporadic reports of fumonisin contaminat...

Thailand is one of the world’s leaders of rice producers and exporters. Farmers have to increase the rice cultivation frequency for serving the national increasing of export’s demand. It leads to an elimination of rice residues by open burning which is the quickest and costless management method. The open burning of rice residue is one of the major causes of air pollutants and greenhouse gas (G...

food. Almost two billion people—one third of the world’s population—depend primarily on rice for basic nourishment. Rice fields cover more than 360 million acres of land around the globe and yield 560 million tons of grain every year. But farmers plant much more rice than they harvest, because insects, bacteria, viruses and fungi often claim a substantial portion of each crop. One of the most d...

From the first insect-resistant genetically modified (IRGM) rice transformation in 1989 in China to October 2009 when the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture issued biosafety certificates for commercial production of two cry1Ab/Ac Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) lines, China made a great leap forward from IRGM rice basic research to potential commercialization of the world's first IRGM rice. Research h...

The authors attempted to estimate rice-planted areas using multi-temporal RADARSAT fine-mode and ERS1/SAR data in an early period of rice-planting season. The eastern part of Hiroshima City, HigashiHiroshima City, was selected as the test field, and three multi-temporal RADARSAT fine-mode images and ERS-1/SAR images, taken before and after rice-planting were used as the test data. From the firs...

Irrigated rice field soil is subjected to frequent changes in oxygen status due to the water regime by agricultural management. In this study, the community response of microeukaryotes in rice field soil to the oxygen status was explored in a microcosm experiment under defined conditions. Water-saturated soil was incubated under a two-level factorial design of oxygen and organic enrichment with...

The impact of environmental perturbation (e.g., nitrogenous fertilizers) on the dynamics of methane fluxes from soils and wetland systems is poorly understood. Results of fertilizer studies are often contradictory, even within similar ecosystems. In the present study the hypothesis of whether these contradictory results may be explained by the composition of the methane-consuming microbial comm...