A layer of harvest residues from the previous crop can reduce wasteful evaporation from the soil surface and thereby increase the efficiency of use of limited water resources for agricultural production. The practice of harvesting sugarcane green and leaving crop residues in the field, as opposed to burning the residue, has been re-adopted in many sugarcane industries worldwide. However, a bett...

Accurate quantification and clear understanding of regional scale cropland carbon (C) cycling is critical for designing effective policies and management practices that can contribute toward stabilizing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. However, extrapolating site-scale observations to regional scales represents a major challenge confronting the agricultural modeling community. This study introdu...

Unprecedented agricultural intensification and increased crop yield will be necessary to feed the burgeoning world population, whose global food demand is projected to double in the next 50 years. Although grain production has doubled in the past four decades, largely because of the widespread use of synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation promoted by the "Green Revolution...

Jae Sun Moon and Richard G. Allen, Department of Crop Sciences, University of Illinois, 1102 South Goodwin Ave., Urbana 61801; Leslie L. Domier, Department of Crop Sciences, University of Illinois, 1102 South Goodwin Ave., Urbana 61801 and U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Crop Protection Research Unit, 1102 South Goodwin Ave., Urbana, IL 61801; and Adriana D. Hewin...

Producing accurate crop maps during the current growing season is essential for effective agricultural monitoring. Substantial efforts have been made to study regional crop distribution from year to year, but less attention is paid to the dynamics of composition and spatial extent of crops within a season. Understanding how crops are distributed at the early developing stages allows for the tim...

Mechanistic crop growth models are becoming increasingly important in agricultural research and are extensively used in climate change impact assessments. In such studies, statistics of crop yields are usually evaluated without the explicit consideration of sample size requirements. The purpose of this paper was to identify minimum sample sizes for the estimation of average, standard deviation ...

Mobilization of unavailable phosphorus (P) to plant available P is a prerequisite to sustain crop productivity. Although most of the agricultural soils have sufficient amounts of phosphorus, low availability of native soil P remains a key limiting factor to increasing crop productivity. Solubilization and mineralization of applied and native P to plant available form is mediated through a numbe...

BACKGROUND By example of a region in Northern Germany (County of Uelzen), this study investigates whether climate change is likely to require adaption of agricultural practices such as irrigation in Central Europe. Due to sandy soils with low water retention capacity and occasional insufficient rainfall, irrigation is a basic condition for agricultural production in the county of Uelzen. Thus, ...

Increased demand of farm products and depletion of natural resources compel the agriculture community to increase the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in various farming processes. Agricultural Decision Support Systems (DSS) proved useful in this regard. The majority of available Agricultural DSSs a re either crop or task specific. Less emphasis has been placed on the devel...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Gene flow from crops to their wild relatives has the potential to alter population growth rates and demography of hybrid populations, especially when a new crop has been genetically modified (GM). This study introduces a comprehensive approach to assess this potential for altered population fitness, and uses a combination of demographic data in two habitat types and mathemat...