Smart and Precision Farming for Climate-Resilient Water and Land Management

Dear Colleagues,

Climate variability is exacerbating drought, heat stress, desertification and freshwater availability in agricultural regions worldwide. In this scenario, the agricultural sector must increase productivity, reduce environmental impacts and ensure economic sustainability simultaneously. Technology-based smart and precision farming, using sensing, geospatial, decision support, automation and data-driven irrigation and fertilizer use, can offer solutions in this area.

The Special Issue, titled ‘Smart and Precision Farming for Climate-Resilient Water and Land Management,’ encourages original articles, review papers, methodological contributions and case studies that explore applications of digital agriculture, precision agronomy and smart monitoring/forecasting platforms that might serve for sustainable water resource management, soil preservation, carbon-efficient farming and more effective climate change resilience at the field scale, farm scale, basin scale and regional scale. Applications that connect technology to real-world problems in agronomy, the environment and policy are especially invited. Agriculture occupies the land–water–climate triangle. The unpredictability of rainfall, increasing occurrences of climate-related extremes, waterlogged conditions caused by over-irrigation, increasing soil salinization, and the acceleration of evapotranspiration rates are pushing the conventional management system beyond its limits.

“Average-year” planning on the usual traditional basis is no longer adequate. Here, there is a need for adaptive systems. The systems should be able to detect stress in near-real time, predict risk before a loss occurs and offer suggestions for actions that save water, protect soils and preserve yield. Technologies for smart and precision agriculture have developed at an incredible pace in the mentioned area. These include the following: proximal and remote sensing of crop conditions and soil water status; the carrying out of “Fert-irrigations” through “variable rating irrigations”; decision-support systems through Edge computing as well as through Cloud computing;  the conducting of “GNSS-guided” operations on the farm; the installation of “Internet of Things” sensors; “Climate, Hydrology and Crop Growth” blends through “AI/ML” techniques and the creation of “Digital Twin” models for the “Farms” as well as for the “Watershed”.

This Special Issue aims to showcase the science, technology and practice of cutting-edge science at this juncture. Of special interest are research that (i) estimate benefits (water saved, yield maintained, emissions reduced), (ii) address uncertainties explicitly (e.g., probabilistic seasonal forecasts, probabilistic drought alerts, climate scenarios) and/or (iii) demonstrate real-world scaling and deployment.

Dr. Dimitrios E. Tsesmelis
Prof. Dr. Pantelis E. Barouchas
Dr. Georgios Bourantas
Dr. Kleomenis Kalogeropoulos
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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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. Earth is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 1400 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.

• precision agriculture
• smart farming
• climate resilience in farming
• carbon farming
• remote sensing for crops
• digital soil
• decision support systems in agriculture
• smart irrigation management