Amongst human practices, agricultural surface-water management systems represent some of the largest integrated engineering works that shaped floodplains during history, directly or indirectly affecting the landscape. As a result of changes in agricultural practices and land use, many drainage networks have changed producing a greater exposure to flooding with a broad range of impacts on societ...

In the current human-influenced era, drought is initiated by natural and human drivers, and human activities are as integral to drought as meteorological factors. In large irrigated agricultural regions with high levels of human intervention, where the natural farmland soil moisture has usually been changed significantly by high-frequency irrigation, the actual severity of agricultural drought ...

The growth and yield of crops in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world is driven by the amount of soil moisture available to the crop through rainfall and irrigation. Various methods have been developed for quantifying the soil moisture status of agricultural crops. Recent technological advances in remote sensing have shown that soil moisture can be measured with a variety of remote sensi...

Unsaturated zone models are useful tools in predicting effects of measures and can be used to optimise agricultural practice aiming to minimise the impact on the environment. However, current soil models have a varying degree of abstraction level referring to simulated processes in time and space. In the framework of an EU funded project the SWAP (Soil-Water-Atmosphere-Plant) and ANIMO (Agricul...

Soils are the third largest global reservoir of carbon and the largest terrestrial ecosystem sink or source of atmospheric CO2 depending on land-use and management. The French authorities ahead of COP21 proposed the ‘four per mil’ initiative aimed at offsetting most global agricultural CO2 emissions by increasing global soil organic carbon (SOC). Since, the Common Agricultural Policies (CAP) re...

Afforestation of agricultural lands has been one of the major land use changes in China in recent decades. To better understand the effect of such land use change on soil quality, we investigated selected soil physical, chemical and microbial properties (0-15 cm depth) in marginal agricultural land and a chronosequence of poplar (Populus euramericana cv. 'N3016') plantations (5-, 10-, 15- and 2...

Agricultural targets mainly concern towards the preservation of the soil and crop productivity. Recent study and analysis of radars in the field of agriculture has determined that interaction of the radar pulses with various conditions of soil have significantly affected backscattering. On discussion to soil conditions, may account such as the moisture content availed and soil tillage. Tilling ...

Mozambique includes 10 agroecological zones with distinct climate and cropping systems (INIA, 1980). Agricultural production is more intensively practiced in the central and northern parts of the country where agroecological conditions are favorable. As a result of 16 years of civil war and low funding for agricultural research few assessments of soil nutrient status have been possible. To asse...

The aim of this study was to generate an easy to use index to evaluate the ecological state of agricultural land from a sustainability perspective. We selected environmental indicators, such as the use of organic soil amendments (green manure) versus chemical fertilizers, plant biodiversity (including crop associations), variables which characterize soil conservation of conventional agricultura...