Drought is a complex and highly destructive natural phenomenon that affects portions of the United States almost every year, and severe water deficiencies can often become catastrophic for agricultural production. Evapotranspiration (ET) by crops is an important component in the agricultural water budget; thus, it is advantageous to include ET in agricultural drought monitoring. The main object...

Pressures on urban, peri-urban and rural water and agricultural systems are increasingly complex with multiple interacting stresses and impacts. As a way of addressing these issues there has been increasing consideration as to how to build and manage resilience in these complex social-ecological systems. This paper presents a case study of the role of water recycling for agricultural use within...

France is currently embarking upon a drastic reform of quantitative water resources management. This reform relies on two principles: the definition of an upper limit to water abstraction per water body and the decentralization of the responsibility for allocating water among users, in particular in the agricultural sector. This paper looks at possible institutional arrangements and incentive-b...

Lack of sewage collection systems, percolation of surface waters, and seepage of wells have raised the groundwater table in Shiraz area in the south of Iran. The growing population generates environmental pollution resulting in the degradation of the quality of surface and groundwaters used for agriculture. Inorganic and organic pollutants have been traced in Shiraz water resources. Heavy metal...

An Interactive Multiple Goal Linear Programming (IMGLP) model is developed that considers objectives of multiple stakeholders, i.e. different farmer groups, district agricultural officers and agricultural scientists for agricultural land use analysis. The analysis focuses on crop selection; considering irrigated and non-irrigated crops such as rice, sugarcane, sorghum, cotton, millet, pulses an...

Agricultural use is by far the largest consumer of fresh water worldwide, especially in the Mediterranean, where it has reached unsustainable levels, thus posing a serious threat to water resources. Having a good estimate of the water used in an agricultural area would help water managers create incentives for water savings at the farmer and basin level, and meet the demands of the European Wat...

Agricultural soil loss and deposition in aquatic ecosystems is a problem that impairs water quality worldwide and is costly to agriculture and food supplies. In the US, for example, billions of dollars have subsidized soil and water conservation practices in agricultural landscapes over the past decades. We used paleolimnological methods to reconstruct trends in sedimentation related to human-i...

Maintaining drinking water quality is essential to water companies and their customers. However, agricultural non-point source pollution of waterways is a major cause of water quality degradation. In this paper we examine the feasibility of using payments financed by a water company to pay farmers to adjust agricultural land management practices to protect water quality. We use the choice exper...

Currently, there is an increased interest in the study of phosphorus (P) loss from soils aimed to understand and mitigate water eutrophication problems. The main objective of this study is to describe P losses in f ive irrigated agricultural watersheds considered as representative in terms of agricultural water management. Weekly water samples were collected during the 2007 hydrologic year (HY)...