Drip irrigation is a means of distributing the exact amount of water a plant needs by dripping water directly onto the root zone. It can produce up to 90% more crops than rain-fed irrigation, and reduce water consumption by 70% compared to conventional flood irrigation. Drip irrigation may enable millions of poor farmers to rise out of poverty by growing more and higher value crops, while not c...

Soil salinity undermines global agriculture by reducing crop yield and impairing soil quality. Irrigation management can help control salinity levels within the soil root-zone. To best manage water and soil resources, accurate regional-scale inventories of soil salinity are needed. The past decade has seen several successful applications of soil salinity remote sensing. Two salinity remote sens...

Field-based soil moisture measurements are cumbersome. Remote sensing techniques based on active or passive microwave data have limitations. This paper presents and validates a new method based on land surface energy balances using remotely sensed optical data ~including thermal infrared!, which allows field and landscape-scale mapping of soil moisture depth-averaged through the root zone of ex...

A transient one-dimensional model of the vertical movement of water and salt in the mangrove root zone is investigated. This is an extension of a previous steady state model which assumed that the ability of the mangrove roots to take up water is uniformly distributed throughout the soil and that the root water uptake is reduced if there is nonzero salt concentration around the roots. We show h...