The success of the Green Revolution in closing the gap between world population and food production was principally achieved by increasing crop productivity in favorable areas. However, this success has been limited in the rainfed systems, which are prone to frequent droughts and other abiotic stresses. Worldwide, drought affects approximately 23 million hectares of rainfed rice. Varieties comb...

This work provides a description of the research conducted to assess methods for the discrimination between irrigated and rainfed open-tree canopies using advanced spaceborne thermal emission and reflection radiometer (ASTER) satellite imagery and discrete anisotropic radiative transfer (DART) radiative transfer 3D simulation model. Summer and winter ASTER images were acquired over a study area...

Irrigation is crucial to agriculture in arid and semi-arid areas and significantly contributes to crop development, food diversity and the sustainability of agro-ecosystems. For a specific crop, the separation of its irrigated and rainfed areas is difficult, because their phenology is similar and therefore less distinguishable, especially when there are phenology shifts due to various factors, ...

Rainfed agriculture occupies 68% of India’s cultivated area and supports 40% of the human and 60% of the livestock population. It produces 445 of the food requirement, thus has and will continue to play a critical role in India’s food security. However, aberrant behaviour of monsoon rainfall, eroded and degraded soils with multiple nutrient and water deficiencies, declining ground water table a...

Rainfed agriculture is practised on 80% of the world’s agricultural area and generates 60–70% of the world’s staple food1 (FAOSTAT, 2005). In semi-arid and dry subhumid zones, rainfed agriculture dominates food production systems, and water is a key limiting factor to crop growth (SEI, 2005). Since approximately 70% of the world’s poor are women, the importance of rainfed sources of food weighs...

The results of two field trials to determine the effect of ratoon stunting disease on the growth and yield of some widely grown and newly released sugarcane varieties are described. In the plant crop of a trial grown under full irrigation, the greatest reductions in yields of cane and sugar among six varieties, approximately 15%, occurred in N 14 and NC0376. In the first ratoon, the greatest re...

The growth status of winter wheat in irrigated field and rainfed field are obviously different and the field types may have an effect on the predictive accuracy of hyperspectral model. The objectives of the present study were to understand the difference of spectral sensitive wavelengths for leaf area index (LAI) in two field types and realize its hyperspectral prediction. In study, a total of ...

Unlike the Central and Eastern U.S. Corn Belt where maize is grown almost entirely under rainfed conditions, maize in the Western Corn Belt is produced under both irrigated (3.2 million ha) and rainfed maize (4.1 million ha) conditions. Simulation modelling, regression, and boundary-function analysis were used to assess constraints to maize productivity in the Western Corn Belt. Aboveground bio...

Daily rainfall and evaporation data of 30 years (1969-1998) are analysed for prediction of hydrological events, such as occurrence of effective monsoon (EM) and withdrawal of monsoon (WM), for planning rainfed rice in Eastern India. Those hydrological events are treated with normal (ND), lognormal (LND), Pearson type 111 (PTD), and log-Pearson type 111 (LPTD) distributions. The historical data ...

The main objective of this study is to present an improved modeling technique called Vegetation ET (VegET) that integrates commonly used water balance algorithms with remotely sensed Land Surface Phenology (LSP) parameter to conduct operational vegetation water balance modeling of rainfed systems at the LSP’s spatial scale using readily available global data sets. Evaluation of the VegET model ...