Maize is the New World’s preeminent grain crop and it provided the economic basis for human culture in many regions within the Americas. To flourish, maize needs water, sunlight (heat), and nutrients (e.g., nitrogen). In this paper, climate and soil chemistry data are used to evaluate the potential for dryland (rainon-field) agriculture in the semiarid southeastern Colorado Plateau and Rio Gran...

Stable isotope techniques can be used to investigate evapotranspiration and its partitioning into evaporation transpiration. However, verification is often difficult due missing information about actual evapotranspiration. Therefore, in this study a methodology tested for laboratory conditions was modified field applications. Evapotranspiration, which determined by weighing lysimeters, were com...

Reducing water losses in agriculture needs a solid understanding of when evaporation (E) occur and how much is used through crop transpiration (T). Partitioning ecosystem T however challenging, even more so it comes to short-statured crops, where many standard methods lead inaccurate measurements. In this study, we combined biometeorological measurements with Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Crop (SPA-Cro...

Higher global temperatures and increased levels of disturbance are contributing to greater tree mortality in many forest ecosystems. These same drivers can also limit forest regeneration, leading to vegetation type conversion. For the Sierra Nevada of California, little is known about how type conversion may affect streamflow, a critical source of water supply for urban, agriculture and environ...

A multi-year, multi-technique study was conducted to measure evapotranspiration and its components within an uneven-aged mixed deciduous forest in the Southeastern United States. Four different measurement techniques were used, including soil water budget (1 year), sap flow (2 years), eddy covariance (5 years), and catchment water budget (31 years). Annual estimates of evapotranspiration were s...

There is a pressing need to improve the water-use efficiency of rain-fed and irrigated crop production. Breeding crop varieties with higher water-use efficiency is seen as providing part of the solution. Three key processes can be exploited in breeding for high water-use efficiency: (i) moving more of the available water through the crop rather than it being wasted as evaporation from the soil ...