Meteorological elements directly influence crop potential productivity, regulating its transpiration, photosynthesis, and respiration processes in such a way as to control the growth and development of the plants throughout their physiological mechanisms at a given site. The interaction of the meteorological factors with crop responses is complex and has been the target of attention of many res...

Effects of climate change on productivity of agricultural crops in relation to diseases that attack them are difficult to predict because they are complex and nonlinear. To investigate these crop-disease-climate interactions, UKCIP02 scenarios predicting UK temperature and rainfall under high- and low-CO(2) emission scenarios for the 2020s and 2050s were combined with a crop-simulation model pr...

A simulation and optimization model was developed and applied to an irrigated area in Delta, Utah to optimize the economic benefit, simulate the water demand, and search the related crop area percentages with specified water supply and planted area constraints. The user interface model begins with the weather generation submodel, which produces daily weather data, which is based on long-term mo...

Crop growth and productivity has largely been vulnerable to various abiotic and biotic stresses that are only set to be compounded due to global climate change. Therefore developing improved varieties and designing newer approaches for crop improvement against stress tolerance have become a priority now-a-days. However, most of the crop improvement strategies are directed toward staple cereals ...

In a semi-arid environment, the main challenge for crop production is water limitation in space and in time. Considered as appropriate tools, models are used to evaluate the effects of water deficit on crop productivity for better irrigation planning and sustainable yield. The AquaCrop model was tested using data collected during a 4-year experiment on soybean (Glycine max L. Merril) and s...

With the increasing pressure on crop production from the evolution of herbicide resistance, farmers are increasingly adopting Integrated Weed Management (IWM) strategies to augment their weed control. These include measures to increase the competitiveness of the crop canopy such as increased sowing rate and the use of more competitive cultivars. While there are data on the relative impact of th...

Large glycosylating toxins are major virulence factors of various species of pathogenic Clostridia. Prototypes are Clostridium difficile toxins A and B, which cause antibiotics-associated diarrhea and pseudomembranous colitis. The current model of the toxins' action suggests that receptor binding is mediated by a C-terminal domain of combined repetitive oligopeptides (CROP). This model is chall...

Recent research on crop-water relations has increasingly been directed towards the application of locally acquired knowledge to answering the questions raised on larger scales. However, the application of the local results to larger scales is often questionable. This paper presents a GIS-based tool, or a GEPIC model, to estimate crop water productivity (CWP) on the land surface with spatial res...

Decision support for nutrient application remains an enigma if based on soil nutrient analysis. If the crop could be used as an auxiliary indicator, the plant nutrient status during different growth stages could complement the soil test, improving the fertilizer recommendation. Nutrient absorption and partitioning in the plant are here studied and described with mathematical models. The objecti...

Crop growth and productivity are determined by a large number of weather, soil and management variables, which vary significantly across space. Remote Sensing (RS) data, acquired repetitively over agricultural land help in identification and mapping of crops and also in assessing crop vigour. As RS data and techniques have improved, the initial efforts that directly related RS-derived vegetatio...