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Agronomy
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Improved and Smart Managements to Promote Resilience for Soil Carbon...
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Improved and Smart Managements to Promote Resilience for Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics in Agro-Ecosystems

A special issue of Agronomy (ISSN 2073-4395). This special issue belongs to the section "Precision and Digital Agriculture".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 May 2023) | Viewed by 3187

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Calogero Schillaci

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Guest Editor
Joint Research Centre, European Commission, Ispra, Italy
Interests: land degradation; soil organic carbon; agricultural systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Giuseppe Badagliacca

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Co-Guest Editor
Dipartimento di Agraria, University of Reggio Calabria, 89124 Reggio Calabria, Italy
Interests: agricultural systems; nitrogen; field crops
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Paola A. Deligios

E-Mail Website
Co-Guest Editor
Dipartimento di Agraria, Università degli Studi di Sassari, Sassari, Italy
Interests: agricultural systems; water use efficiency; horticulture
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In the last decade, sustainability and resilience have become keywords in both scientific and daily life vocabulary, and a must for agricultural sector stakeholders. Farmers, crop protection and the fertilizer industry, as well as policy makers, have taken this message seriously, developing actions to reduce pressure on the agroecosystems and find alternative ways to increase efficiency. The best way to do this is by looking at new management strategies.

Furthermore, thanks to the remote sensing development, the agricultural machinery industry has improved the technology of positioning with global positioning systems (GPS), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) (mostly drones) and portable active and passive sensors that can help farmers optimize fertilizer distribution during the cropping season. At world scale, big investment in the space industry (e.g. the Sentinel mission of the European Space Agency) had a positive impact on agriculture worldwide, and other similar plans in other countries have allowed the development of tools and knowledge like never before.

This Special Issue will provide an outlet for such applications of the state of the art of crop nutrition aided by sensors, with a particular emphasis on management practices that, by combining smart technologies and different agronomic managements (e.g., organic farming, conservative agriculture, or agroecological approaches), foster soil carbon maintenance and nitrogen use efficiency improvement.

This Special Issue also welcomes review articles and original research articles that report field and tree crop trials that used satellite data, optical and radar imagery, NIR, panchromatic RGB, multispectral and hyperspectral imagery for agronomy.

Dr. Calogero Schillaci
Dr. Giuseppe Badagliacca
Dr. Paola A. Deligios
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agronomy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • agricultural systems
  • evidence synthesis

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

15 pages, 982 KiB  
Article
Short-Term Crop Residue Management in No-Tillage Cultivation Effects on Soil Quality Indicators in Virginia
by Martin L. Battaglia, Wade Thomason, Ekrem Ozlu, Esmaeil Rezaei-Chiyaneh, John H. Fike, André Amakobo Diatta, Omer Suha Uslu, Emre Babur and Calogero Schillaci
Agronomy 2023, 13(3), 838; https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy13030838 - 13 Mar 2023
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2622
Abstract
The use of crop residues for biofuel production has the potential to provide environmental and economic benefits to modern societies. Because of the profound impacts that crop residues have on agricultural productivity and soil health, a sustainable utilization of these residues is required. [...] Read more.
The use of crop residues for biofuel production has the potential to provide environmental and economic benefits to modern societies. Because of the profound impacts that crop residues have on agricultural productivity and soil health, a sustainable utilization of these residues is required. Thus, we determined crop yield and quality response for a range of biomass retention rates in grain cropping systems. Combinations of corn (Zea mays L.) stover (0, 3.33, 6.66 and 10 Mgha−1) and wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) straw (0, 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 Mgha−1) were soil applied in a corn-wheat/soybean (Glycine max L. Merr.) rotation in Virginia’s Coastal Plain. Corn stover (0, 3.33, 6.66, 10 and 20 Mg ha−1) was applied in a continuous corn cropping system in the Ridge/Valley province. For each system, residues were applied following grain harvest over two production cycles. Each experiment was conducted as a randomized complete block design with four replications. Two cycles of crop residue management, with retention rates of up to 20 Mg ha−1 of corn stover retention in Blacksburg, and up to 13 Mg ha−1 of corn stover and wheat straw in New Kent, had no effect on total nitrogen (TN) and carbon (TC) concentrations, CN ratios, bulk density (BD), soil pH, field capacity, permanent wilting point, plant available water and water aggregate stability across soil depths and aggregate sizes in Virginia. In one situation when residue management slightly affected BD (0–2.5 cm depth, NK1), differences across the sixteen total retained residues treatments were less than 5%, thus rendering them not biologically or environmentally meaningful. Overall, results of this study did not show any clear short-term impact, resulting from various rates of crop residue retention in Virginia cropping systems. These incipient negative impacts resulting from very low rates of residue return warrant further studies to corroborate whether these results are to be found following long-term scenarios of crop residue management. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Improved and Smart Managements to Promote Resilience for Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics in Agro-Ecosystems)
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