Onattukara sandy loam tract an important agro ecological zone spread over the Karunagapally taluk of Kollam and Karthikapally and Mavelikara taluks of Alappuzha districts of Kerala. The soils are highly permeable, acidic in reaction and are extremely deficient in all the major plant nutrients. Sesamum is mainly grown in Kerala as a sole crop in the summer rice fallows of Onattukara tract. The c...

Sorghum is the fifth most important cereal crop in the world. It is largely grown on marginal soils with residual moisture where other major cereals cannot be grown due to inadequate water. Sorghum is a multipurpose crop and the species shows great diversity. For a large part of Asia and Africa, sorghum’s grain is used as food and its stalk as fodder and feed. In rest of the world, sorghum is c...

in determining how a plant responds to moisture deficit stress. Moisture deficits can depress cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) lint Although there has been considerable research docuyield in all cotton production regions. However, most cotton physiomenting the growth and physiological response of cotton logical drought stress research has been conducted in arid production to moisture deficit stre...

Recent flooding and heavy precipitation events in the US and worldwide have caused great damage to crop production. If the frequency of these weather extremes were to increase in the near future, as recent trends for the US indicate and as projected by global climate models (e.g., US National Assessment, Overview Report, 2001, The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, Nation...

Green roofs are a common stormwater control measure used to help mitigate increased stormwater runoff caused by urbanization. Green roofs can retain upwards of 90% of rain given the appropriate conditions. Green roof design parameters, such as substrate composition and depth and plant type, affect the retention capabilities of green roofs by storing and allowing greater extraction of water by p...

The Weishan Irrigation Zone along the lower reaches of the Yellow River consists of a total irrigated area of 3600 ha. The region has an average annual rainfall of 500–600 mm, with 60–70% of local rainfall occurring during the summer, and with less than 15% in spring. The water deficit during the spring affects the winter wheat growth from March to early June, which is a major growth period sig...

Using the proposed Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission as a case study, this paper investigates how the presence and nature of vegetation influence the values of geophysical variables retrieved from multi-angle microwave radiometer observations. Synthetic microwave brightness temperatures were generated using a model for the coherent propagation of electromagnetic radiation through ...

Nitrogen application often dramatically increases crop yields, but N needs vary spatially across fields and landscapes. Remote sensing collects spatially dense information that may contribute to, or provide feedback about, N management decisions. There is potential to accurately predict N fertilizer need at each point in the field. This would reduce surplus N in the crop production system witho...

Compared with the backscattering configuration, the bistatic scattering echoes can provide multidimensional information on land surface. Based on the Michigan Microwave Canopy Scattering (MIMICS) model, a first-order microwave bistatic scattering model for vegetations is developed in this paper. The dominant scattering mechanism for wheat and soybean in the L and C bands is analyzed by simulati...

Seed dispersal is one of the vehicles of gene flow in plants. If a seed carrying transgene(s) is dispersed into the environment, the fate can be determined by its persistence in the soil bank, which can also vary in different ecotypes of a species and the physical environment of the soil including temperature and moisture. This study aimed at investigating ecotypic differences in wild sorghum f...