Irrigation in developing countries tends to be stereotyped as equity reducing, in competition with other uses for scarce water resources, and often resulting in negative impacts for women and other disadvantaged groups. Agricultural intensification through the practice of irrigation as a strategy for poverty reduction is examined. There are four inter-related mechanisms through which irrigated ...

The operations of water resources infrastructures, like dams and diversions, often involve multiple conflicting interests and stakeholders. Agent-based approaches have recently attracted an increasing attention to design optimal operating policies for these systems. In this paper we contribute a general monotonic concession negotiation protocol that allows the stakeholders-agents of a regulated...

Quantitative system approaches, provided by process‐based models of agricultural systems, are essential for optimizing the use of increasingly limited water and soil resources, guiding tactical management, and addressing the environmental concerns and global issues of the 21st century. Agricultural engineers have made significant contributions in the past to model development and applications i...

Soil salinity undermines global agriculture by reducing crop yield and impairing soil quality. Irrigation management can help control salinity levels within the soil root-zone. To best manage water and soil resources, accurate regional-scale inventories of soil salinity are needed. The past decade has seen several successful applications of soil salinity remote sensing. Two salinity remote sens...

water markets are instrumental in efficient allocation and pricing of scarce water by enhancing allocative and price efficiency of water use. the prerequisites for water market formation are tradable water rights independent from ownership of the land, extensive water canals, water use associations, and adequate market regulations. mojen water market has been facilitating exchange of alternativ...

Growing crops for bio-fuels is often criticized because of its direct competition for land for food production. The recent price increases on world food markets are partly a result of this competition. For instance, cereals prices have increased by more than 60% percent since 2005 and in 2006 sugar prices peaked on a level twice as high as the level of previous years. There are concerns whether...

Understanding the effects of intensive agricultural land use activities on water resources is essential for natural resource management and environmental improvement. In this paper, multi-scale nested watersheds were delineated and the relationships between two representative water quality indexes and agricultural land use intensity were assessed and quantified for the year 2000 using multi-sc...