Agriculture accounts for most of the renewable freshwater resource withdrawals in Malawi, yet food insecurity and water scarcity remain as major challenges. Despite Malawi’s vast water resources, climate change, coupled with increasing population and urbanisation are contributing to increasing water scarcity. Improving crop water productivity has been identified as a possible solution to water ...

Considering the persistently growing pressure on finite freshwater and soil resources, it becomes increasingly clear that the challenge of feeding tomorrow’s world population is, to a large extent, about improved water productivity within present land use. Rain-fed agriculture plays a critical role in this respect. Eighty per cent of the agricultural land worldwide is under rain-fed agriculture...

In this paper, we design a water resource allocation mechanism which plays the role of incentives for promotion of the water use efficiency and productivity by taking water distribution for enterprices as an example. It firstly divided the water allocation problem into three cases according to the relationship among amounts of water allocatable and demanded for enterprises. By discussing the th...

The southeastern United States is one of the most rapidly growing human population regions in continental United States, and as the population increases, the demand for commercial, industrial, and residential water will also increase (USWRC, 1978). Forest species type, stand age, and the climate all influence the amount of water use and yield from these areas (Swank et al., 1988). Because fores...

Theoretical analysis of the CO(2) assimilation and water loss by single leaves suggests that the water use efficiency of C(4) species decreases as stomatal resistance increases. To confirm this hypothesis for a complete maize crop, results from computer simulations and a field experiment were compiled for varying stomatal resistances. A soil-plant-atmosphere model allowed simulations of the man...

Intrinsic water use efficiency (WUEi) in trees is an indication of the ratio of carbon assimilation to the rate of transpiration. It is generally assumed that it is a response to water availability. In agricultural research, the question of drought tolerance by increased WUEi has been well studied. In general, the increase is a trade-off for productivity and is therefore not desired. For forest...

to investigate the effect of deficit irrigation on quantitative and qualitative yield of soybean cultivars, an experiment was conducted as split plots based on randomized complete block design with three replications at agricultural research farm, university of guilan, during 2009. main factors were included four irrigation levels based on potential moisture 30-35 (i1), 50-55 (i2), 70-75 (i3) c...

*Hydraulic redistribution (HR) of water via roots from moist to drier portions of the soil occurs in many ecosystems, potentially influencing both water use and carbon assimilation. *By measuring soil water content, sap flow and eddy covariance, we investigated the temporal variability of HR in a loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) plantation during months of normal and below-normal precipitation, and ...