Pearl millet [Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.] a widely used grain and forage crop, is grown in areas frequented with one or more abiotic stresses, has superior drought and heat tolerance and considered a model crop for stress tolerance studies. Selection of suitable reference genes for quantification of target stress-responsive gene expression through quantitative real-time (qRT)-PCR is importa...

Crop specific ontologies for phenotype annotations in breeding have proliferated over the last 10 years. Across-crop data interoperability involves linking those ontologies together. For this purpose, the Planteome project is mapping the Crop Ontology traits (www.cropontology.org) to the reference ontology for plant traits, Trait Ontology (TO). Manual mapping is timeconsuming and not sustainabl...

To set up a reasonable crop irrigation system in the context of global climate change in Northern Xinjiang, China, reference crop evapotranspiration (ET0) was analyzed by means of spatiotemporal variations. The ET0 values from 1962 to 2010 were calculated by Penman-Monteith formula, based on meteorological data of 22 meteorological observation stations in the study area. The spatiotemporal vari...

Daily evapotranspiration (ET) rates are needed for irrigation scheduling. Owing to the difficulty of obtaining accurate field measurements, ET rates are commonly estimated from weather parameters. A few empirical or semi–empirical methods have been developed for assessing daily reference crop ET, which is converted to actual crop ET using crop coefficients. The FAO Penman–Monteith method, which...

A crop model with genetic inputs can potentially simulate yield for a large range of genotypes, sites, and years, thereby indicating where and when a given combination of alleles confers a positive effect. We discuss to what extent current crop models, developed for predicting the effects of climate or cultivation techniques on a reference genotype, are adequate for ranking yields of a large nu...

A sensitivity analysis was conducted to determine the relative effects of measurement errors in climate data input parameters on the accuracy of calculated reference crop evapotranspiration (ET) using the ASCE-EWRI Standardized Reference ET Equation. Data for the period of 1995 to 2008 from an automated weather station located at the USDA-ARS Conservation and Production Research Laboratory at B...