Rice acreage estimation is a key aspect to guarantee food security and also important to support government agricultural subsidy system. In this paper, we explored a sophisticated method to improve rice estimation accuracy at county scale and we developed our approach with China Environment Satellite HJ-1A/B data in Hunan Province, a fragmented area with complex rice cropping patterns. Our appr...

The extreme climate of the northern Great Plains of North America requires cropping systems to possess a resilient soil resource in order to be sustainable. This paper summarizes the interactive effects of tillage, crop sequence, and cropping intensity on soil quality indicators for two long-term cropping system experiments in the northern Great Plains. The experiments, located in central North...

Maize stover is beginning to be used as a cellulosic biofuel feedstock in the Midwestern United States; however, there are concerns that stover removal could result in increased soil erosion and loss of soil organic matter. Use of a winter cover crop following maize harvest has the potential to mitigate these impacts and may have additional benefits by providing continuous living cover in annua...

Time series data on cropping pattern at disaggregated level were analysed and its implications on geospatial drought assessment were demonstrated. An index of Cropping Pattern Dissimilarity (CP-DI) between a pair of years, developed in this study, proved that the cropping pattern of a year has a higher degree of similarity with that of recent past years only and tends to be dissimilar with long...

A class of cyclic balanced designs with ten test-hills is introduced; these designs can be repeated cyclically any number of times up to the requirement of the experimenter and subject to the availability of experimental material. The designs are balanced with respect to first order nearest neighbours and there are 26 isomorphism classes of such designs. The designs are suitable for de Wit repl...

Eastern forests of the US are valued both as a carbon sink and a wood resource. The amount of biomass that can be harvested sustainably from this biome for bioenergy without compromising the carbon sink is uncertain. Using past literature and previously validated models, we assessed four scenarios of biomass harvest in the eastern US: partial harvests of mixed hardwood forests, pine plantation ...

BACKGROUND Harnessing beneficial microbes presents a promising strategy to optimize plant growth and agricultural sustainability. Little is known to which extent and how specifically soil and plant microbiomes can be manipulated through different cropping practices. Here, we investigated soil and wheat root microbial communities in a cropping system experiment consisting of conventional and org...