Considering the persistently growing pressure on finite freshwater and soil resources, it becomes increasingly clear that the challenge of feeding tomorrow’s world population is, to a large extent, about improved water productivity within present land use. Rain-fed agriculture plays a critical role in this respect. Eighty per cent of the agricultural land worldwide is under rain-fed agriculture...

4}} INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background. The major challenges facing Kenya today are poverty and unemployment. About 50% of the rural population and 30% of the urban population live below the poverty line. With 80% of the population being rural the poverty problem is overwhelming. The country has been unable to generate adequate employment and wage employment has been declining over the recent past. Wh...

Healthy soils provide the foundation for sustainable agriculture. However, soil health degradation has been a significant challenge agricultural sustainability and environmental quality in water-limited environments, such as arid semi-arid regions. Soils these regions is often characterized by low organic matter (SOM), poor fertility, overall productivity, thus limiting ability to build SOM. So...

Over more than a century there has been debate about the interactions of kangaroos and introduced domestic stock, especially sheep, in the semi-arid and arid rangelands. The potential for competition between the species is still controversial, with pastoralists generally assuming that exploitative competition is a continuing feature of the rangelands, with competition by kangaroos leading to re...

The Northern Yinchuan Plain is a productive agricultural area of northwest China, which is under threat due to soil salinization. According to the formation and restoring history of soil salinization, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was adopted for analyzing the causes of soil salinization and efficiency of various restoring measures. The calculated results of the relative weights of the i...

As of 2010, it is estimated that 10.5 million people live along the trans -national Rio Grande (RGV) with 83% of the population residing in Mexico and several of the fastest growing cities in the U.S. (SandovalSolis et al., 2013). Historically, agricultural irrigation has been the largest water consumer for each country accounting for 86% of total consumption (Sandoval-Solis et al., 2013). Urba...

Increasing water use and droughts, along with climate variability and land use change, have seriously altered vegetation growth patterns and ecosystem response in several regions alongside the Andes Mountains. Thirty years of the new generation biweekly normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI3g) time series data show significant land cover specific trends and variability in annual producti...

Building on farmer’s agroecological knowledge to design environmental-friendly agricultural systems is crucial given the environmental impact of industrial agriculture. We investigated the drivers of farmers’ knowledge of agrobiodiversity management and analyzed how farmers’ knowledge and their current farming contexts may guide future farming systems in sub-humid (Bassila) and semi-arid (Bouko...

Over the past few decades, the competition for freshwater resources has substantially increased in arid/semi-arid areas, exacerbating the pressure on the largest user of water, namely agriculture, to consume less water. However, reducing crop consumptive water use or evapotranspiration through water stress can have a negative impact on production economics if not precisely managed. Remote sensi...

Determination of optimal cropping pattern is essential for arid and semiarid regions with deficit water resources. Fars province is located in the southern part of I.R. of Iran with mean annual precipitation from 50 to 1000 mm and in most parts of this province water resources for agriculture are deficit. Jahrom region with semi-arid climate is located in Fars province with mean annual rainfall...