The next advance in field crop productivity will likely need to come from improving crop use efficiency of resources (e.g., light, water, and nitrogen), aspects of which are closely linked with overall crop photosynthetic efficiency. Progress in genetic manipulation of photosynthesis is confounded by uncertainties of consequences at crop level because of difficulties connecting across scales. C...

Better irrigation management and more efficient management of crop production require modeling of plant growth and crop yield. More applicable models are usually simple and requires less and accessible inputs. The objective of this study was to develop a model for growth and yield prediction of saffron under various irrigation regimes. In this modeling soil water budget and other simple rel...

Accurate and timely information on rice crop growth and yield helps governments and other stakeholders adapting their economic policies, enables relief organizations to better anticipate and coordinate relief efforts in the wake of a natural catastrophe, and provides technical backbone of an insurance solution where risks of yield losses from the rice smallholders are transferred to the insuran...

One of the remaining methodological challenges of agricultural LCAs is the inclusion of crop rotation effects. They are caused by changes in physical, chemical and biological properties of the agricultural land over time (e.g. soil structure, presence and availability of nutrients, phytosanitary conditions) and cannot be easily measured. LCA studies, focusing on only one vegetation period, have...

• Why do we need to estimate the entire distribution? The distribution of an economic entity is of fundamental importance to decision makers, especially if they are risk averse and the underlying distribution is not Gaussian, a situation that calls for consideration of factors beyond the usual mean variance analysis. In particular the tail distribution plays a particularly crucial role in risk ...

Crop yield is the result of complex interaction among factors of soil, atmosphere, plant genotype, and management practices adopted. These complex interactions of crop with various factors and of factors among themselves make the crop yield modeling a difficult task. Several methods of crop yield forecasting have been developed ranging from purely statistical to agro-meteorological to empirical...

State observer is an essential component in computerized control loops for greenhouse-crop systems. However, the current accomplishments of observer modeling for greenhouse-crop systems mainly focus on mass/energy balance, ignoring physiological responses of crops. As a result, state observers for crop physiological responses are rarely developed, and control operations are typically made based...