agricultural water use
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Land ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Yanling Zhi ◽  
Fan Zhang ◽  
Huimin Wang ◽  
Teng Qin ◽  
Jinping Tong ◽  
...  

Affected by global climate change and water shortages, food security continues to be challenged. Improving agricultural water use efficiency is essential to guarantee food security. China has been suffering from water scarcity for a long time, and insufficient water supply in the agricultural sector has seriously threatened regional food security and sustainable development. This study adopted the super-efficiency slack-based model (SBM) to measure the provincial agricultural water use efficiency (AWUE). Then, we applied the vector autoregression (VAR) Granger causality test and social network analysis (SNA) method to explore the spatial correlation of AWUE between different provinces and reveal the interprovincial transmission mechanism of spillover effects in AWUE. The results show the following: (1) In China, the provincial AWUE was significantly enhanced, and the gaps in provincial AWUE have widened in the past 20 years. (2) There were apparent spatial heterogeneity and correlations of provincial AWUE. The provinces with higher AWUE were mainly located in economically developed and coastal areas. (3) The correlation of AWUE between provinces showed significant network structure characteristics. Fujian, Hebei, Jiangsu, Shandong, and Hubei Qinghai were central to the network, with high centrality. (4) The AWUE spatial correlation network could be divided into four blocks. Each block played a different role in the cross-provincial transmission of spillover effects. Therefore, it is necessary to manage the agricultural water resources and improve water use efficiency from the perspective of the network.


2022 ◽  
pp. 112-120
Author(s):  
Jeffrey P. Mitchell ◽  
Anil Shrestha ◽  
Lynn Epstein ◽  
Jeffery A. Dahlberg ◽  
Teamrat Ghezzehei ◽  
...  

To meet the requirements of California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, there is a critical need for crop production strategies with less reliance on irrigation from surface and groundwater sources. One strategy for improving agricultural water use efficiency is reducing tillage and maintaining residues on the soil surface. We evaluated high residue no-till versus standard tillage in the San Joaquin Valley with and without cover crops on the yields of two crops, garbanzo and sorghum, for 4 years. The no-till treatment had no primary or secondary tillage. Sorghum yields were similar in no-till and standard tillage systems while no-till garbanzo yields matched or exceeded those of standard tillage, depending on the year. Cover crops had no effect on crop yields. Soil cover was highest under the no-till with cover crop system, averaging 97% versus 5% for the standard tillage without cover crop system. Our results suggest that garbanzos and sorghum can be grown under no-till practices in the San Joaquin Valley without loss of yield.


Author(s):  
Jiameng Lai ◽  
Yanan Li ◽  
Jianli Chen ◽  
Guo-Yue Niu ◽  
Peirong Lin ◽  
...  

Abstract Northwestern China (NWC) is among the major global hotspots undergoing massive terrestrial water storage (TWS) depletion. Yet driver(s) underlying such region-wide depletion remain controversial, i.e., warming-induced glacier-melting versus anthropogenic activities. Reconciling this controversy is the core initial step to guide policy-making for combating the dual challenges in agriculture production and water scarcity in the vastly dry NWC towards sustainable development. Utilizing diverse observations, we found persistent cropland expansion by >1.2×104km2 since 2003, leading to 59.9% growth in irrigated area and 19.5% in agricultural water use, despite a steady irrigation efficiency enhancement. Correspondingly, a substantially faster evapotranspiration increase occurred in crop expansion areas, whereas precipitation exhibited no long-term trend. Counterfactual analyses suggest that the region-wide TWS depletion is unlikely to have occurred without crop expansion-driven evapotranspiration increase even in the presence of glacier-melting. These findings imply that sustainable water management is critically needed to ensure agriculture and water security in NWC.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 5167
Author(s):  
Neda Abbasi ◽  
Hamideh Nouri ◽  
Kamel Didan ◽  
Armando Barreto-Muñoz ◽  
Sattar Chavoshi Borujeni ◽  
...  

Advances in estimating actual evapotranspiration (ETa) with remote sensing (RS) have contributed to improving hydrological, agricultural, and climatological studies. In this study, we evaluated the applicability of Vegetation-Index (VI) -based ETa (ET-VI) for mapping and monitoring drought in arid agricultural systems in a region where a lack of ground data hampers ETa work. To map ETa (2000–2019), ET-VIs were translated and localized using Landsat-derived 3- and 2-band Enhanced Vegetation Indices (EVI and EVI2) over croplands in the Zayandehrud River Basin (ZRB) in Iran. Since EVI and EVI2 were optimized for the MODerate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), using these VIs with Landsat sensors required a cross-sensor transformation to allow for their use in the ET-VI algorithm. The before- and after- impact of applying these empirical translation methods on the ETa estimations was examined. We also compared the effect of cropping patterns’ interannual change on the annual ETa rate using the maximum Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series. The performance of the different ET-VIs products was then evaluated. Our results show that ETa estimates agreed well with each other and are all suitable to monitor ETa in the ZRB. Compared to ETc values, ETa estimations from MODIS-based continuity corrected Landsat-EVI (EVI2) (EVIMccL and EVI2MccL) performed slightly better across croplands than those of Landsat-EVI (EVI2) without transformation. The analysis of harvested areas and ET-VIs anomalies revealed a decline in the extent of cultivated areas and a loss of corresponding water resources downstream. The findings show the importance of continuity correction across sensors when using empirical algorithms designed and optimized for specific sensors. Our comprehensive ETa estimation of agricultural water use at 30 m spatial resolution provides an inexpensive monitoring tool for cropping areas and their water consumption.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Huang ◽  
Mengqi Wang ◽  
Zhongren Zhou ◽  
Yajuan Yu ◽  
Yixing Bi

Beijing, the capital of China, is experiencing a serious lack of water, which is becoming a main factor in the restriction of the development of the social economy. Due to the low economic efficiency and high consumption proportion of agricultural water use, the relationship between economic growth and agricultural water use is worth investigating. The “decoupling” index is becoming increasingly popular for identifying the degree of non-synchronous variation between resource consumption and economic growth. However, few studies address the decoupling between the crop water consumption and agricultural economic growth. This paper involves the water footprint (WF) to assess the water consumption in the crop production process. After an evaluation of the crop WF in Beijing, this paper applies the decoupling indicators to examine the occurrence of non-synchronous variation between the agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) and crop WF in Beijing from 1981 to 2013. The results show that the WF of crop production in 2013 reduced by 62.1% compared to that in 1980 — in total, 1.81 × 109 m3. According to the decoupling states, the entire study period is divided into three periods. From 1981 to 2013, the decoupling states represented seventy-five percent of the years from 1981 to 1992 (Period I) with a moderate decoupling degree, more than ninety percent from 1993 to 2003 (Period II) with a very strong decoupling degree and moved from non-decoupling to strong decoupling from 2004 to 2013 (Period III). Adjusting plantation structure, technology innovation and raising awareness of water-saving, may promote the decoupling degree between WF and agricultural GDP in Beijing.


Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 2037
Author(s):  
Aliasghar Montazar

Efficient management and conservation practices for agricultural water use are essential for adapting to and mitigating the impacts of the current and future discrepancy between water supplies and water demands [...]


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farshad Fathian ◽  
Zohreh Dehghan ◽  
Babak Vaheddoost

Abstract Drought is a natural phenomenon that has environmental and socio-economical drawbacks. Especially in arid and semi-arid regions, human activities are closely linked to the water supply and agricultural water use. Although the consequences of drought are prolonged, immediate actions are needed in practice which urges the continuous need for drought monitoring. The present study addresses a regional frequency analysis (RFA) for extreme drought events including severity, duration, and magnitude over Iran. Standardized precipitation index (SPI) time series with 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 moving averages are determined from 106 meteorological stations for the period 1993-2016. Using Ward’s clustering analysis, the drought characteristics are grouped into different clusters and their homogeneity is confirmed by the heterogeneity measure test based on the L-moment approach. The results of RFA indicate that both generalized Pareto (GP) and Pearson type 3 (PE3) distribution functions are the best-fitted regional models to the most identified homogenous clusters of all three drought characteristics, by which the quantiles of each drought characteristic related to different return periods, T = 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, 75, and 100 years, are estimated. The spatial pattern of the drought characteristics for all SPI time scales shows that extreme droughts in terms of severity, duration, and magnitude may occur everywhere in the country regardless of local climate conditions. As such, even humid and rainy regions including northern, northwestern, and western parts of Iran that receive high annual precipitation would encounter extreme and severe drought characteristics. It is concluded that the drought risks in the region are mostly the outcome of mismanagement, water resource allocation, and agricultural water use but could be exacerbated due to climatic events.


Author(s):  
Jiaxing Pang ◽  
Ningfei Wang ◽  
Xue Li ◽  
Xiang Li ◽  
Huiyu Wang ◽  
...  

The change of agricultural production scale is directly related to food security and the stable development of social economy. Particularly, the influence of economic development level and agricultural water use on agricultural production scale cannot be ignored. Therefore, this paper uses the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and the Dumitrescu–Hurlin panel causality test models to discuss the effects of the level of economic development, agricultural water use, the level of urbanization, and the market price of agricultural products on the scale of agricultural production in China. The analysis results indicated that agricultural water use, the level of urbanization, and the market price of agricultural products promoted an increase of the scale of agricultural production at the total sample level; a 1% increase for these three variables will result in an increase of the scale of agricultural production of 0.634%, 0.377%, and 0.292%, respectively. The influence of economic development level on agricultural production scale accords with Kuznets curve. However, at the regional level, the influence of each variable on the eastern region is consistent with the trend of the total sample. In the central region, the impact of economic development on agricultural production scale shows a U-shaped curve, and the improvement of urbanization level inhibits the expansion of agricultural production scale. In the western region, all variables failed to pass the significance test. The results of the FMOLS model were validated by the fixed effects model. The results of causality tests showed that bidirectional causality existed between the scale of agricultural production and the level of economic development, the scale of agricultural production and agricultural water use, the level of economic development and the market price of agricultural products, and the level of urbanization and the market price of agricultural products. In different regions, there were differences in causality between variables. Therefore, based on the empirical results, we put forward some policy suggestions to maintain the scale of agricultural production.


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