Search Results (4)

Effective water and soil management is crucial for crop productivity, particularly in rice cultivation, where poor soil quality and water scarcity pose challenges. The response of deeper-rooted rice grown in soils amended with different soil amendments (SAs) to Internet of Things (IoT)-managed alternate wetting and drying (AWD) irrigations remains undetermined. This study explores the effects of various SAs on DRO-1 IR64 rice plants under IoT-based soil moisture monitoring of AWD irrigation. A greenhouse experiment executed at the Tokyo University of Agriculture assessed two water management regimes—continuous flooding (CF) and AWD—alongside six types of SAs: vermicompost and peat moss (S + VC + PM), spirulina powder (S + SPP), gypsum (S + GS), rice husk biochar (S + RHB), zeolite (S + ZL), and soil without amendment (S + WA). Soil water content was continuously monitored at 10 cm depth using TEROS 10 probes, with data logged via a ZL6 device and managed through the ZENTRA Cloud application (METER GROUP Company). Under AWD conditions, VC + PM showed the greatest decline in volumetric water content due to enhanced root development and water uptake. In contrast, SPP and ZL maintained consistent water levels. Organic amendments like VC + PM improved soil properties and grain yield, while AWD with ZL and GS optimized water use. Strong associations exist between root traits, biomass, and grain yield. These findings highlight the benefits of integrating SAs for improved productivity in drought-prone rice systems. Full article

From the perspective of institutional economics, we investigate the impact of fiscal decentralization on regional green development in China and its transmission mechanism through influencing sports fiscal expenditures on regional green development. Based on panel data of Chinese provincial regions from 2006 to 2017 in China, we use fixed effects models, two-stage least squares, and mediating effects models to find that fiscal decentralization accelerates regional green sustainability. Fiscal decentralization can enhance the government’s emphasis on sports and promote the smart and intelligent development of the sports and health industry, thus contributing to the improvement of green and sustainable development. There is regional heterogeneity in the effect of the governmental emphasis on sports, and the mediating effect of the degree of emphasis on sports is more obvious in the eastern region. We verify the possibility that the government can accelerate economic green sustainability by raising the importance of the sports and health industry development and promoting the intelligent infrastructure of sports and enrich the theoretical study of the ecological effect of fiscal decentralization from the perspective of sports economic development. Full article

The reproductive stage of rice is vulnerable to heat stress, which reduces spikelet fertility and yield. Auxin significantly influences reproductive development, hence the research aimed to enhance spikelet fertility and grain attributes in rice plants by exploring the application efficiency of Indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) and 1-naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA) under heat stress. This study investigated the effects of IAA (10 μmol L⁻¹) and NAA (100 μmol L⁻¹) on spikelet fertility rate in six rice genotypes during the flowering stage. Compared to the heat stress (HS) treatment, the spikelet production rate and grain yield per plant were higher by 61.16%, 37.25%, and 33.07%, and 72.84%, 44.48%, and 32.71% in control, HS + NAA, and HS + IAA treatments, respectively. In addition, panicle weight, primary branches number panicle⁻¹, and 1000-grains weight were significantly (p < 0.05) improved with HS + IAA and HS + NAA application under heat stress conditions. Auxin application enhanced photosynthetic and transpiration rate, while contrarily, leaf temperature diminished. The higher photosynthetic rate showed positive relationships with spikelet fertility (r = 0.64) and yield plant⁻¹ (r = 0.63). Additionally, leaf temperature had a strongly negative correlation (r = −0.81) with the spikelet fertility rate. The application of auxin increased the number of filled grains panicle⁻¹, which showed a positive relationship (r = 0.75) with grain yield plant⁻¹. The variation of spikelet fertility rate among genotypes was dependent on the variety tolerance rate. Overall, these findings indicate that exogenous auxin application can mitigate the negative impact of heat stress on rice and improve spikelet fertility and grain yield. Full article

On 26 August 2020, a devastating flash flood struck Charikar city, Parwan province, Afghanistan, causing building damage and killing hundreds of people. Rapid identification and frequent mapping of the flood-affected area are essential for post-disaster support and rapid response. In this study, we used Google Earth Engine to evaluate the performance of automatic detection of flood-inundated areas by using the spectral index technique based on the relative difference in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (rdNDVI) between pre- and post-event Sentinel-2 images. We found that rdNDVI was effective in detecting the land cover change from a flash flood event in a semi-arid region in Afghanistan and in providing a reasonable inundation map. The result of the rdNDVI-based flood detection was compared and assessed by visual interpretation of changes in the satellite images. The overall accuracy obtained from the confusion matrix was 88%, and the kappa coefficient was 0.75, indicating that the methodology is recommendable for rapid assessment and mapping of future flash flood events. We also evaluated the NDVIs’ changes over the course of two years after the event to monitor the recovery process of the affected area. Finally, we performed a digital elevation model-based flow simulation to discuss the applicability of the simulation in identifying hazardous areas for future flood events. Full article