Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Agriculture
Sustainable irrigation reduces arsenic bioavailability in fluvio-alluvial soils promoting microbial responses, high rice productivity and economic profit
Published: 2023-07-26
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Microbiology
Minimizing arsenic (74.92As33) loading into rice plants, we suggest adopting alternating wetting and drying (AWD) irrigation as a sustainable water management strategy allowing greater silicon (28.08Si14) availability. This two-year field-based project is the first report on AWD's impact on As-Si distribution in fluvio-alluvial soils of the entire Ganga valley (24 study sites divided into six [...]
Regenerative Agriculture the Veganic Way: A Seven-year Research Study in Increasing Soil Organic Matter (SOM) and Crop Yields
Published: 2023-07-15
Subjects: Agriculture
Agriculture is a major contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and biodiversity loss, mostly through deforestation for the cultivation of animal feeds; enteric fermentation from ruminants like cattle, fertilizers and manure; and soil degradation from intensive farming practices. There is currently a push to transform our farming systems to attempt to alleviate the almost-assured [...]
A deep learning approach for deriving winter wheat phenology from optical and SAR time series at field level
Published: 2023-07-13
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring
Information on crop phenology is essential when aiming to better understand the impacts of climate and climate change, management practices, and environmental conditions on agricultural production. Today’s novel optical and radar satellite data with increasing spatial and temporal resolution provide great opportunities to provide such information. However, so far, we largely lack methods that [...]
Information trust and groundwater management: Evaluating the role of formal versus informal information sources in adoption of groundwater conservation practices among California farmers
Published: 2023-06-21
Subjects: Agriculture
The future of farming in many water-stressed regions will depend in large part upon sustainable management of groundwater. Understanding the drivers associated with uptake of groundwater conservation practices in agriculture is thus critical for policy, programmatic, and technical support development. While a rich body of research has explored farmers’ conservation practice adoption, [...]
Does Productive Safety Net Program Enhance Livelihoods? Insights from Vulnerable Households in Wolaita Zone, Ethiopia
Published: 2023-06-16
Subjects: Agriculture
The impact of Productive Safety Net Programs (PSNPs) on food security, poverty, and livelihoods has been examined in several studies. While some studies found positive impacts on food security and agricultural productivity, there are still gaps in understanding the long-term effects of these programs on poverty reduction and food security. This study aims to investigate the impact of PSNP on the [...]
A paradigm shift towards decentralized cloud-integrated spatial data infrastructures: Lessons learned and solutions provided for public authorities
Published: 2023-06-08
Subjects: Agriculture, Computer and Systems Architecture, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Sustainability
Digital transformation is a key to turn public authorities into organisations that make decisions based on data-driven insights. The use of big geodata can enable public authorities to tackle complex sustainability issues. However, the efficient management of large amounts of geodata through implementing viable data infrastructures represents a major challenge for public authorities. In this [...]
A Climate Counternarrative: Dubious Carbon Accounting is Making a Canopy Problem Look Like an Energy Problem (for Consent and Profit)
Published: 2023-05-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Climate, Forest Sciences, Soil Science
The modern rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is man-made but driven by land stewardship changes rather than industrial activities like fossil fuels. Carbon cycle research fails to adequately convey surface-level interactions like plants soaking up carbon dioxide emitted near them. Clear-cutting a forest, for instance, produces a large plume of biogenic carbon dioxide that wind can carry away, [...]
Ammonia emissions from a dairy housing and a wastewater treatment plant quantified with an inverse dispersion method accounting for deposition loss
Published: 2023-04-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering
Ammonia (NH3) emissions negatively impact air, soil, and water quality, hence human health and biodiversity. Significant emissions, including the largest sources, originate from single or multiple structures, such as livestock facilities and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The inverse dispersion method (IDM) is effective in measuring total emissions from such [...]
Revisiting the Climate Narrative
Published: 2023-04-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Food Science, Forest Management, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Environmental Sciences, Soil Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is chiefly tied to land stewardship. Farmers and loggers have removed the plants that, until the industrial era, kept the soil fungi alive, kept soil emissions nearby by breaking the wind, and soaked those up. The result is plumes of carbon dioxide. Putting plants back in would curb these emissions. Farmers and loggers could address biodiversity loss [...]
Mitigating risk of exceeding environmental limits requires ambitious food system interventions
Published: 2023-04-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
Transforming the global food system is necessary to avoid exceeding planetary boundaries. A robust evidence base is crucial to assess the scale and combination of interventions required for a sustainable transformation. We developed a risk assessment framework, underpinned by a meta-regression of 60 global food system modeling studies, to quantify the potential of individual and combined [...]
Photosynthetically Active Radiation Separation Model for High-Latitude Regions in Agrivoltaic Systems Modelling
Published: 2023-03-31
Subjects: Agriculture, Power and Energy
Photosynthetically active radiation is a key parameter for modelling the photosynthetic behaviour of plants in response to sunlight and, subsequently, for determining crop yield. Separating photosynthetically active radiation into direct and diffuse components is of significance to agrivoltaic systems, which combine solar energy conversion and agricultural farming on the same portion of land. [...]
Crop Yield Prediction based on Reanalysis and Crop Phenology Data in the Agroclimatic Zones
Published: 2023-03-24
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Crop yield and phenological stages are remarkably sensitive to not only environmental factors like atmospheric conditions and physical properties of soils but also agricultural activities. Accurate crop yield prediction plays a crucial role in food security and agricultural sustainability. There are several approaches that a wide range of researchers have tried to predict crop yield at different [...]
Towards robust interdisciplinary modeling of global human-environmental dynamics
Published: 2023-02-20
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Real-world environmental problems are typically vast, urgent, and complex. Confronted with such problems, we are often tempted to act fast by pulling together little bits and pieces from different fields and simply adding these to pre-existing models and frameworks. Seldom, though, do we pause long enough to look whether and for how long those larger structures we build can support reliable [...]
Protecting fish and farms: incentivising adoption of modern fish-protection screens for water pumps and gravity-fed diversions in Australia
Published: 2023-02-17
Subjects: Agriculture
Modern fish-protection screens offer significant potential benefits for Australia. The Commonwealth and New South Wales (NSW) governments have invested over $30m to incentivise early adoption by water users. However, successful adoption requires an understanding of the motivations and abilities of water users, and strategies to overcome key barriers to adoption. Four practices have been used in [...]
Solar irradiance distribution under vertically mounted agrivoltaic systems – Model development, validation, and applications for microclimate assessment
Published: 2022-11-21
Subjects: Agriculture, Power and Energy
ccurate assessment of the Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR) and Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) at the crop level is paramount for accurately assessing the energy balances and the crop yield under agrivoltaic systems. The shadings produced by the photovoltaic modules and structures of the agrivoltaic systems cause a non-homogeneous distribution of PAR and GHI at the crop level. It is [...]