Accurate, objective, reliable, and timely predictions of crop yield over large areas are critical to helping ensure the adequacy of a nation’s food supply and aiding policy makers on import/export plans and prices. Development of objective mathematical models of crop yield prediction using remote sensing is highly desirable. In this study, we develop a new methodology using an artificial neural...

System of Rice Intensification (SRI) management practices depart from conventionallyrecommended methods for rice cultivation, aiming to provide rice plants with optimal growing conditions, to enhance yield and resource productivity (Stoop et al. 2002). The benefits of SRI practices have been seen already in 42 countries and are reported to increase yields of irrigated rice by 25–50% or even mor...

Agricultural soils are heterogeneous environments in which conditions affecting microbial growth and diversity fluctuate widely in space and time. In this study, the molecular ecology of the total bacterial and free-living nitrogen-fixing communities in soils from the Nafferton Factorial Systems Comparison (NFSC) study in northeast England were examined. The field experiment was factorial in de...

Monitoring for escape of genetically modified (GM) oilseed rape (Brassica napus) during transport can be performed by means of roadside evaluations in areas where cultivation of this GM crop is not conducted, such as in Japan. We performed a survey of oilseed rape plants growing along a 20-km section of Japan's Route 51, one of the main land transportation routes in central Japan for imports of...

Since the 2000s, bioenergy land use has been rapidly expanded in U.S. agricultural lands. Monitoring this change with limited acquisition of remote sensing imagery is difficult because of the similar spectral properties of crops. While phenology-assisted crop mapping is promising, relying on frequently observed images, the accuracies are often low, with mixed pixels in coarse-resolution imagery...

Agro-ecoregionalization is categorization of landscapes for use in crop suitability analysis, strategic agroeconomic development, risk analysis, and other purposes. Past agro-ecoregionalizations have been subjective, expert opinion driven, crop specific, and unsuitable for statistical extrapolation. Use of quantitative analytical methods provides an opportunity for delineation of agro-ecoregion...

Crop acreage assessment is of particular importance in China where total crop land area is shrinking following the urbanization, directly threatening the policy of grain self-sufficiency. This study demonstrated the application potential of remote sensing to estimate large crop areas on the North China Plain (NCP). The cropping pattern in this plain comprises two growth seasons per year. The ha...

Year to year variation in yield is an inherent risk associated with crop production and many growers rely on intensive mechanical or chemical inputs to preserve crop yield in the face of fluctuating environmental conditions. However, as interest grows in alternative crop management systems which depend less on external inputs, determining the degree to which management systems can impact the te...