Crop yields are limited by a combination of biotic stresses, abiotic stresses, and nutritional factors. various analyses have suggested that abiotic stress—due primarily to drought, heat, cold or salinity—is the major factor that prevents crops from realizing their full yield potential (e.g. Boyer, 98 ; edmeades, 008). Increases in crop yields through conventional plant breeding result from gen...

Acid soils limit crop production on 30-40% of the world’s arable land and up to 70% of the world’s potentially arable land (Haug, 1983). Although the poor fertility of acid soils is due to a combination of mineral toxicities (aluminum and manganese) and deficiencies (phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, and molybdenum), Al toxicity is the single most important factor, being a major constraint for cr...

continuing agricultural expansion and urban development in saudi arabia, (located in an arid climate), together with an increased demands for more water supplies, calls for more efficient irrigation practices, and an increase in crop water productivity (cwp). throughout the present study, a deficit irrigation system was investigated for its impact on soil salinity, crop response factor (ky), cw...

Tolerance, defined as the ability of a crop to maintain yield in the presence of disease, is a difficult characteristic to measure, and its component traits are generally undefined. It has been studied as a characteristic of plant genotypes grown singly or in monoculture crop stands. However, it is similarly valid as a characteristic of ecosystems, or mixtures / inter-cropping in crops and this...

The covariability of temperature (T), precipitation (P) and radiation (R) is an important aspect in understanding the climate influence on crop yields. Here, we analyze county-level corn and soybean yields and observed climate for the period 1983-2012 to understand how growing-season (June, July and August) mean T, P and R influence crop yields jointly and in isolation across the CONterminous U...

Winter wheat crop yield forecasting at national, regional and local scales is an extremely important task. This paper aims at assessing the efficiency (in terms of prediction error minimization) of satellite and biophysical model based predictors assimilation into winter wheat crop yield forecasting models at different scales (region, county and field) for one of the regions in central part of ...

Reference crop evapotranspiration (ET o), used to determine actual crop evapotranspiration, is often estimated from pan evaporation (EP) data. However, uncertainties in the relationship between ET o and EP often result in unreliable estimate of crop evapotranspiration. This study investigated the relationship between measured and estimated crop evapotranspirations, ET m and ET e, respectively, ...

BACKGROUND Childhood cancer is the main cause of disease-related death in children in Spain. Although little is known about the etiology, environmental factors are potential explanations for a fraction of the cases. Previous studies have shown pesticides to be associated with childhood cancer. The difficulty of collecting personal environmental exposure data is an important limitation; this lac...

Recent flooding and heavy precipitation events in the US and worldwide have caused great damage to crop production. If the frequency of these weather extremes were to increase in the near future, as recent trends for the US indicate and as projected by global climate models (e.g., US National Assessment, Overview Report, 2001, The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, Nation...

Recently, grey relational analysis (GRA) has been widely applied in analyzing multivariate time series data (MTS); as a solution to the traditional statistical limitations. GRA, which has been proven to be simple and accurate method for analysing relationship in MTS are broadly used in various disciplines such as economics, sociology and engineering. GRA is employed to search for grey relationa...