Water available for irrigation is declining in many rice-growing regions around the world. Global populations continue to rise increasing crop production demand. Rice production systems must face the dilemma of maintaining or increasing yields with less water available to irrigate. Alternate wetting and drying (AWD) has shown to be an effective tool for water conservation in irrigated rice syst...

Using robust, pairwise comparisons and a global dataset, we show that nitrogen concentration per unit leaf mass for nitrogen-fixing plants (N2FP; mainly legumes plus some actinorhizal species) in nonagricultural ecosystems is universally greater (43-100%) than that for other plants (OP). This difference is maintained across Koppen climate zones and growth forms and strongest in the wet tropics ...

Irrigated agriculture is placing increasing pressure onfinite freshwater resources, especially in developing countries, wherewater extraction is often unregulated, un-priced and even subsidized.To shift agriculture to amore sustainable use ofwaterwithout harming the food security and livelihoods of hundreds ofmillions of smallholders, substantial improvements ofwater use efficiencywill be requi...

Rainfed environments are characterised by unpredictable and highly variable seasonal rainfall and hence highly variable yields. Water use efficiency (WUE, yield per unit of water use) is commonly used for agricultural production with limited water resources. Expertise working towards the water resources need to address the multitudinous aspects in which cropping systems and amounts, timing and ...

abstract fertilizer use efficiency (fue) is one way of improving the fertilizer management in agriculture. in this study, spinach (spinacea oleracea) was used as a case study vegetable to determine its nitrogen use efficiency in varamin, iran. an experiment was conducted using split plot design with three replications. treatments included of five levels of n as 0, 150, 200, 250 and 300 kg ha-1 ...

Worldwide food security and water safety issues necessitate countries with low water use efficiency of crop production (CWUE) to increase it and reduce regional CWUE variations. CWUE function was estimated with stochastic frontier analysis, and CWUE variation was decomposed on inter-continental, intra-continental and international level with variance decomposition method. It is proposed that in...

Peter A. Troch1,2* Guillermo F. Martinez1 Valentijn R. N. Pauwels3 Matej Durcik4 Murugesu Sivapalan5,6 Ciaran Harman6 Paul D. Brooks1,4 Hoshin Gupta1,4 and Travis Huxman7,2 1 Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, University of Arizona, USA 2 Biosphere 2 Earthscience, University of Arizona, USA 3 Laboratory of Hydrology and Water Management, Ghent University, Belgium 4 SAHRA (Sustainabili...

Climatic extremes threaten agricultural sustainability worldwide. One approach to increase plant water-use efficiency (WUE) is to introduce crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) into C3 crops. Such a task requires comprehensive systems-level understanding of the enzymatic and regulatory pathways underpinning this temporal CO2 pump. Here we review the progress that has been made in achieving this g...