Problem Statement Agricultural water management (AWM) is not a goal in itself but part of a process of resource management that provides a critical input to agricultural production and farmer incomes. Today, huge losses in irrigation systems and poor water management practices worsen the water crises that already exist. Water users were surveyed in order to explore their perception about the fa...

Agricultural-induced increase of nitrate (NO3) loading in groundwater is a worldwide problem. This study investigates the impacts of agricultural activities on groundwater NO3 pollution in a Yellow River irrigated region. The agricultural land use patterns are dependent on the land and water conditions. Besides wheat–maize rotation, the most popular cultivation pattern, other patterns with high...

Water problems are typically studied at the level of the river catchment. About 70% of all water is used for agriculture, and agricultural products are traded internationally. A full understanding of water use is impossible without understanding the international market for food and related products, such as textiles. The water embedded in commodities is called virtual water. Based on a general...

Beijing suffers from a severe water shortage. To find the key factors that impact the agricultural water footprint (WF) within Beijing to relieve the pressure on water resources, this study quantifies the agricultural WF within Beijing from 1980 to 2012 and examines the factors of population, urbanization level, GDP per capita, Engel coefficient, and total rural power using an extended stochast...

Jordan is extremely water-scarce with just 167 m3 per capita per year to meet domestic, industrial, agricultural, tourism, and environmental demands. The heavy exploitation of water resources has contributed to declines in the levels of aquifers and the Dead Sea. Rapid growth in demand, particularly for higher quality water for domestic, industrial, and tourism uses, is significantly increasing...

Water is an essential input for agricultural production. Agriculture, in turn, is globalized through the trade of agricultural commodities. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model that emphasizes four tradeoffs involving water-use decision-making that are important yet not always considered in a consistent framework. One tradeoff focuses on competition for water among different economic s...

Increasing competition for water across sectors increases the importance of the river basin as the appropriate unit of analysis to address the challenges facing water resources management; and modeling at this scale can provide essential information for policymakers in their resource allocation decisions. This paper introduces an integrated economic–hydrologic modeling framework that accounts f...

Targeting of agricultural conservation practices to the most effective locations in a watershed can promote wise use of conservation funds to protect surface waters from agricultural nonpoint source pollution. A spatial optimization procedure using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool was used to target six widely used conservation practices, namely no-tillage, cereal rye cover crops (CC), filter...

The potential impacts of climate change are expected to reshape the patterns of demand and supply of water for agriculture, therefore the assessment of the impacts of climate change on agricultural water consumption will be essential. The water footprint provides a new approach to the assessment of agricultural water consumption under climate change. This paper provides an analysis of the impac...