Evapotranspiration represents the combined loss of soil water from the earth’s surface to the atmosphere through evaporation of water from the soil or plant surfaces and transpiration via stomates of the plant. In agricultural production systems these two losses of water represent a major component of the water balance of the crop. If we examine evapotranspiration over time throughout a growing...

The Water and Global Change (WATCH) project evaluation of the terrestrial water cycle involves using land surface models and general hydrological models to assess hydrologically important variables including evaporation, soil moisture, and runoff. Such models require meteorological forcing data, and this paper describes the creation of the WATCH Forcing Data for 1958–2001 based on the 40-yr ECM...

The potential of modeling the FAO Penman-Monteith (FAO-56 PM) method for computing reference crop evapotranspiration (ETo) using feed-forward backpropagation artificial neural networks (FFBANN) with minimal measured climate data such as with the air temperature (maximum and minimum) was investigated using local climatic data from the Wa Meteorological weather station. Three FFBANN models were d...

Camelina sativa is an oilseed with desirable agronomic and oil-quality attributes for a viable industrial oil platform crop. Here we generate the first chromosome-scale high-quality reference genome sequence for C. sativa and annotated 89,418 protein-coding genes, representing a whole-genome triplication event relative to the crucifer model Arabidopsis thaliana. C. sativa represents the first c...

The Generation Challenge programme (GCP) is a global crop research consortium directed toward crop improvement through the application of comparative biology and genetic resources characterization to plant breeding. A key consortium research activity is the development of a GCP crop bioinformatics platform to support GCP research. This platform includes the following: (i) shared, public platfor...

In both Australia and Swaziland large areas of sugarcane rely on irrigation to produce a viable crop or to improve rainfed productivity. Matching water supply to crop demand is essential for productivity and sustainability in any irrigation scheme. Historically Class-A pan evaporation was used as a basis for determining sugarcane water demand or evapotranspiration (ETc). ETc is now frequently o...

To explore small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing identifying technology for horticultural crop diseases, and to combine it with small UAV spraying, the peach leaf blade was taken as material, the peach shot-hole disease was taken as object for spectral capture, and the intellectualized identifying and precision control system for horticultural crop diseases were developed, mainly i...

A computer program was developed to study multiple crop production and control in controlled environment plant production systems. The program simulates crop growth and development under nominal and off-nominal environments. Time-series crop models for wheat (Triticum aestivum), soybean (Glycine max), and white potato (Solanum tuberosum) are integrated with a model-based predictive controller. ...

Soil management practices that maintain crop residue cover and reduce tillage improve soil structure, increase organic matter content in the soil, positively influence water infiltration, evaporation and soil temperature, and play an important role in fixing CO2 in the soil. Consequently, good residue management practices on agricultural land have many positive impacts on soil quality, crop pro...