Conservation agriculture is often presented as being ‘climate smart’ due to anticipated increases in soil moisture. The extent of enhanced water availability in farmers’ fields is, however, poorly documented. This paper presents five data sets describing soil moisture in fields of small-scale conservation and conventional farmers in the Agro-ecological Zone IIa, Zambia. The data include (1) soi...

Patrick C. Tobin*, Barry B. Bai, Donald A. Eggen and Donna S. Leonard Forest Service, United States Department of Agriculture, Northern Research Station, Morgantown, West Virginia 26505, USA; Oregon Department of Agriculture, Plant Division, Salem, Oregon 97301, USA; Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Bureau of Forestry, Division of Forest Pest Management, Middletown...

Worldwide the search is on for sustainable solutions to the competing needs for forest conservation and agricultural development. A strategy with contemporary salience arises in intensive, sedentarized agriculture that can protect forests and enhance livelihoods for forest dwellers. This paper investigates why intensive agriculture does not limit deforestation in southeastern Mexico’s Calakmul ...

Conservation tillage has been promoted as a solution to counteract constraints caused by intensive agriculture. In this work the effects of two conservation tillage systems, reduced tillage (RT) and no-tillage (NT) were compared to the traditional tillage (TT) in a long(15 years, RT) and short-term experiment (3 years, NT). Both experiments were carried out under semi-arid, rainfed agriculture ...

A heuristic optimization algorithm for adaptive wireless sensor network design and energy management for precision agriculture is presented. The algorithm takes into account application-specific requirements, communication constraints and energy conservation characteristics. Genetic algorithms are used as the optimization tool of the developed system and an appropriate fitness function is devel...

1 Texas AgriLife Research, Texas A&M System, Vernon TX 76384 2 Department of Wildland Resources, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322-52305 3 Centre for the Management of Arid Environments, Locked Bag 22, Kalgoorlie, WA 6433, Australia 4 United States Department of Agriculture-Natural Resources Conservation Service, Springfield, CO 81073 5 United States Department of Agriculture-Natural Resou...