Efficient Utilization and Conservation of Agricultural Water and Soil Resources

Dear Colleagues,

Given the growing population and the limited availability of arable land and water resources, there is an urgent need to increase crop productivity through the sustainable use of water resources in agriculture. Higher crop yields have previously been derived from breeding high-yielding, N-responsive and water-efficient cultivars. However, in the present food production and irrigated agriculture systems, crop yield is limited more by the availability of nutrients and water resources than other factors. Thus, the yield gap between actual and maximum attainable yield is a critical factor that generally relates to the crop management practices, especially those involving water and soil resources.

Water scarcity and the competition between agricultural and non-agricultural water users has increased the need to explored new water management techniques at the farm level to enhance crop water productivity. Improvement in crop water productivity can be achieved through novel irrigation management approaches, such as deficit and regulated deficit irrigation. These approaches require accurate estimation of potential crop evapotranspiration (ETc), which is difficult to compute accurately without advanced sensors and computer models to simulate crop growth and evapotranspiration partitioning. Additionally, water management influences fertilizer/nitrogen use efficiency, thus affecting crop production, productivity, quality and GHGs emissions of agricultural landscape.

Therefore, it is necessary to develop solutions for efficient utilization of agriculture water resources to improve crop water productivity. One such approach is to apply deficit irrigation and regulated deficit irrigation for better utilization of limited agriculture water resources. The proposed Special Issue will investigate how water productivity may be improved under different climate conditions and address the general objective of efficient utilization of agricultural water resources for climate change adaptation/mitigation and resource use efficiency. The specific objectives are:

• To formulate deficit irrigation strategies for improved water productivity. 
• To evaluate the combination of deficit irrigation and fertilizer treatment to improve the agriculture water productivity under limited water availability.
• To expand the results to different soil types and climatic conditions using a crop growth modeling approach.

Dr. Qaisar Saddique
Dr. Ali Ajaz
Dr. Yufeng Zou
Guest Editors

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