crop productivity, water use efficiency (wue), and microbial biomass c and n in rainfed dry area are influenced by tillage, rotation, and crop residue management. field experiments were conducted during 2005-08 to study the effect of tillage, crop rotation, and crop residue retention on oat fodder yield, water use efficiency, and microbial biomass c (mbc) and n (mbn) under semi-arid conditions ...

A recurrent issue for data integration is the lack of a common and structured vocabulary used by different parties to describe their data sets. The Crop Ontology (www.cropontology.org) project aims to provide a central place where the crop community can gather to generate such standardized vocabularies and structure them into ontologies. Having standardized ontologies opens the world of the Sem...

Crop model simulates growth and yield of crop in field scale and can be used to provide useful field information for farmers, such as irrigation application dates and amount, fertilizer application dates and amount, the choose of crop variety. Researchers have used crop models for many years, but they have had limited success in packaging these complex models in a framework that make them easy ...

Although a many studies concerning crop residue burning have been conducted, the influence of crop residue burning on local PM2.5 concentrations remains unclear. The number of crop residue burning spots was the highest in Heilongjiang province and we extracted crop residue burning spots for this region using MOD14A1 (Thermal Anomalies & Fire Daily L3 Global 1 km) data and national land cover da...

Weed control through crop rotation has mainly been studied in a nonspatial context. However, weed seeds are often spread beyond the crop field by a variety of vectors. For weed control to be successful, weed management should thus be evaluated at the landscape level. In this paper we assess how seed dispersal affects the interactions between crop rotation and landscape heterogeneity schemes wit...

The lead review “Risk assessment of genetically modified crops for nutrition and health” by Magaña-Gómez and Calderon de la Barca,1 ends with a common plea: “more research is needed”. It is valid to put both this plea and the justification for other similar research into perspective. How selective are the reviews that lead to the conclusion that more of such research is needed?What comparators ...

Orthomosics and digital surface models (DSM) derived from aerial imagery, acquired by consumer-grade cameras, have the potential for crop type mapping. In this study, a novel method was proposed for extracting the crop height from DSM and for evaluating the orthomosics and crop height for the identification of crop types (mainly corn, cotton, and sorghum). The crop height was extracted by subtr...

Returning crop residue improves water conservation and storage, nutrient availability, and crop yields. We have little knowledge, however, of the residual impacts of crop residues on soil and crop production. We hypothesized that residual impacts of crop residues vary with the amount of residues used. A 10-yr study near Lincoln, NE, evaluated the residual effects of an earlier 8-yr study of var...