Filtering by Subject: Agriculture
Published: 2021-09-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Wheat is a staple crop that is critical for feeding a hungry and growing planet, but its nutritive value has declined as global temperatures have warmed. The price offered to producers depends not only on yield but also grain protein content (GPC), which are often negatively related at the field scale but can positively covary depending in part on management strategies, emphasizing the need to [...]
Published: 2021-07-18
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Applied Statistics, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces, Natural Resources and Conservation, Software Engineering, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Growing interest in data-driven, decision-support tools across the life sciences and physical sciences has motivated development of web applications, also known as web apps. Web apps can help disseminate research findings and present research outputs in ways that are more accessible and meaningful to the general public--from individuals, to governments, to companies. Specifically, web apps enable [...]
Published: 2021-06-22
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences
In this work, a new metric called ‘Service-weighted Product Level Absolute Sustainability’ is proposed as a numerical indicator to determine if a product is sustainable. The service offered by a product was found to be crucial to normalize its environmental impact and permit comparisons between products. Service-weighted Product Level Absolute Sustainability is demonstrated here with examples of [...]
Published: 2021-05-05
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Biology, Other Environmental Sciences, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Soil Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Anthropogenic activities have dramatically altered the global nitrogen (N) cycle. Atmospheric N deposition, primarily from combustion of biomass and fossil fuels, has caused acidification of precipitation and freshwater and triggered intense research into ecosystem responses to this pollutant. Experimental simulations of N deposition have been the main scientific tool to understand ecosystem [...]
Published: 2021-04-14
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Engineering
The 2018 drought in Sweden has triggered questions about climate adaptation and mitigation measures, especially in the agricultural sector, which suffered the most. This study applies a water-food-energy nexus modelling framework to evaluate drought impacts on irrigation and agriculture in Sweden using 2018 and 2019 as case studies. A previous water-food-energy nexus model was updated to [...]
Published: 2021-03-22
Subjects: Agriculture
At the intersection of climate change and rural development, wildfire has emerged as a threat to agriculture in the western United States. This nexus is particularly problematic for the rapidly developing cannabis industry in California, which includes farms located outside of traditional agricultural zones and within landscapes potentially more prone to wildfire. Using fire hazard severity [...]
Published: 2021-03-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Mapping the changing characteristics of Africa's smallholder-dominated agricultural systems, including the sizes and numbers of fields, is crucial for understanding food security and a range of other socioeconomic and environmental concerns. However, accurately mapping these systems is difficult because of 1) the spatial and temporal mismatch between satellite sensors and smallholder fields, and [...]
Published: 2021-03-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Climate change will alter key climatic conditions which human societies directly rely on and which, for example, food production is adjusted to. Here, using Holdridge Life Zones, we define Safe Climatic Space (SCS), a concept that incorporates the decisive climatic characteristics of precipitation, temperature and aridity. This allows us first to define the climatic niche of current food [...]
Published: 2020-12-31
Subjects: Agriculture, Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Plant Sciences
Sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) is a promising new tool for remotely estimating photosynthesis. However, the degree to which incoming sunlight and the structure of the canopy rather than leaf physiology contribute to SIF variations is still not well characterized. Here we demonstrate that the canopy structure-related near-infrared reflectance of vegetation multiplied by incoming [...]
Published: 2020-10-22
Subjects: Agriculture, Computer Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Water Resource Management
Advances in sensing and computation have accelerated at unprecedented rates and scales, in turn creating new opportunities for natural resources managers to improve adaptive and predictive management practices by coupling large environmental datasets with machine learning (ML). Yet, to date, ML models often remain inaccessible to managers working outside of academic research. To identify [...]
Published: 2020-07-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Crop residues are acknowledged as a key biomass resource to feed tomorrow’s sustainable bioeconomy. Yet, the quantification of these residues at large geographical scales is primarily reliant upon generic statistical estimations based on empirical functions linking the residues production to the primary crop yield. These useful yet unquestioned functions are developed either using direct evidence [...]
Published: 2020-05-25
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Unoccupied areal vehicles (UAVs or drones) are increasingly used in field research. Drones capable of routinely and consistently capturing high quality imagery of experimental fields have become relatively inexpensive. However, converting these images into scientifically useable data has become a bottleneck. A number of tools exist to support this workflow, but there is no framework for making [...]
Published: 2020-05-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
This paper presents an extension of the stochastic ecohydrological model for soil moisture dynamics at a point of Rodriguez-Iturbe et al. (1999) and Laio et al. (2001). In the original model, evapotranspiration is a function of soil moisture and vegetation parameters, so that the model is suitable for water-limited environments. Our extension introduces a dependence on maximum evapotranspiration [...]
Published: 2020-05-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences
We suggest that the unprecedented and unintended decrease of emissions of air pollutants during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 could lead to declining seasonal ozone concentrations, and positive impacts on crop yields. An initial assessment of the potential effects of COVID-19 emission reductions was made using a set of six scenarios that variously assumed annual European and global emission [...]
Published: 2020-04-14
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences
Food security is a crucial issue in the Sahel and could be endangered by climate change and demographic pressure during the 21st century. Indeed, people in rural areas mainly practice rainfed agriculture for subsistence during the monsoon rainfall season. Higher temperatures and changes in rainfall induced by global warming are threatening food production systems in this region while the [...]