Water shortage is the primary limiting factor for crop production and long-term agricultural sustainability of the North China Plain. Forage cultivation emerged recently in this region. A fiver-year field experiment studies were conducted at Yucheng Integrated Experiment Station to quantify the water requirement and water use efficiency of seven forage varieties under climate variability, that ...

Conservation agriculture is often presented as being ‘climate smart’ due to anticipated increases in soil moisture. The extent of enhanced water availability in farmers’ fields is, however, poorly documented. This paper presents five data sets describing soil moisture in fields of small-scale conservation and conventional farmers in the Agro-ecological Zone IIa, Zambia. The data include (1) soi...

For more than 50 years, scientific insights from surface water monitoring have supported Swedish evidence-based environmental management. Efforts to understand and control eutrophication in the 1960s led to construction of wastewater treatment plants with phosphorus retention, while acid rain research in the 1970s contributed to international legislation curbing emissions. By the 1990s, long-ti...

Marine fish is one of the most important sources of animal protein for human use, especially in developing countries with coastlines. Marine fishery is also an important industry in many countries. Fifty years ago, many people believed that the ocean was so vast and so resilient that there was no way the marine environment could be changed, nor could marine fishery resources be depleted. Half a...

The precipitation climatology and the underlying climate mechanisms of the eastern Mediterranean, West Asia, and the Indian subcontinent are reviewed, with emphasis on upper and middle tropospheric flow in the subtropics and its steering of precipitation. Holocene climate change of the region is summarized from proxy records. The Indian monsoon weakened during the Holocene over its northernmost...

Pure water has a pH of 7.0 (neutral); however, natural, unpolluted rainwater actually has a pH of about 5.6 (acidic).[Recall from Experiment 1 that pH is a measure of the hydrogen ion (H+) concentration.] The acidity of rainwater comes from the natural presence of three substances (CO2, NO, and SO2) found in the troposphere (the lowest layer of the atmosphere). As is seen in Table I, carbon dio...

Drought is perhaps the manifestation of desertification, which may be because of unprecedented soil erosion, large scale deforestation and abrupt change in micro-climate thereby increasing the temperature and reducing rainfall etc., ultimately leads to fall of groundwater level and hence, loss of agricultural productivity of the land, due to lack of water resources. Since, Indian Agriculture is...