In the United States, policy initiatives aimed at increasing sources of renewable energy are advancing bioenergy production, especially in the Midwest region, where agricultural landscapes dominate. While policy directives are focused on renewable fuel production, biodiversity and ecosystem services will be impacted by the land-use changes required to meet production targets. Using data from fi...

Soil biological activity was calculated on a daily basis, using standard meteorological data from African weather stations, a simple soil water model, and commonly used assumptions regarding the relations between temperature, soil water content, and biological activity. The activity factor r(e_clim) is calculated from daily soil moisture and temperature, thereby taking the daily interaction bet...

Industrialized small-scale pig farming has been rapidly developed in developing regions such as China and Southeast Asia, but the environmental problems accompanying pig farming have not been fully recognized. This study investigated 168 small-scale pig farms and 29 example pig farms in Yujiang County of China to examine current and potential impacts of pig wastes on soil, water and crop qualit...

A sensitivity analysis was conducted to determine the relative effects of measurement errors in climate data input parameters on the accuracy of calculated reference crop evapotranspiration (ET) using the ASCE-EWRI Standardized Reference ET Equation. Data for the period of 1995 to 2008 from an automated weather station located at the USDA-ARS Conservation and Production Research Laboratory at B...

Information on rice crop phenology is important for crop management. This study aimed to detect rice crop phenology in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta using time-series MODIS data in 2007. Data processing steps included: (1) constructing time-series MODIS NDVI data, (2) filtering noise from the time-series data using empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and wavelet transform, (3) detecting rice crop ...

A 2-year ®eld study was conducted in eastern Ontario to evaluate the effect of water table management (WTM) on the yields of strip-cropped corn (Zea mays L.) and soybean (Glycine max Merr.). The WTM treatments consisted of two subirrigation treatments with water table controls set at 0.50 m (CWT0.5) or 0.75 m (CWT0.75) from the soil surface, and a free drainage (FD) treatment (water table 1.00 ...

Inter-annual crop yield variation is driven in large parts by climate variability, wherein the climate components of temperature and precipitation often play the biggest role. Nonlinear effects of temperature on yield as well as interactions among the climate variables have to be considered. Links between climate and crop yield variability have been previously studied, both globally and at regi...

Improving crop yields are essential to meet the increasing pressure of global food demands. The loss of high quality land, the slowing in annual yield increases of major cereals, increasing fertilizer use, and the effect of this on the environment all indicate that we need to develop new strategies to increase grain yields with less impact on the environment. One strategy that could help addres...

The paper elaborates upon a hybrid approach of data mining and statistical methods, being investigated to modelling climate effects i.e., arising from year-to-year variability in weather conditions, on grape crop of three different varieties cultivated in northern New Zealand. Recent research using iterative χ method based approach to modelling climate effects on “high” and “low’ yearly yield (...

simultaneous heat and water model (shaw) is based on the assimilation rate of melting and/or freezing of the accumulated snow as well as melting of ice in soil. the main objective of this study was to evaluate applicability of shaw model in determining maximum depth of frost penetration in soils in some typical climates of iran. to this end, the daily data of air temperature, soil temperatures ...