It has been a great month for SHui research dissemination by our Israeli SHui partner, ARO. Dr Alon Ben-Gal has been busy speaking at 3 international events related to our WP2.

On 19th October 2020, Dr Ben-Gal was invited to speak at the Israel-Germany workshop on Agricultural Innovation and Adaption to Climate Change about “Irrigation water quality effects on soils, crops and resource use efficiencies”.

At the 2020 ASA-SSSA-CSA Annual International meeting (9th-12th Nov), Dr Ben-Gal was an invited speaker in the “Symposium on Optimizing Water Productivity in Irrigated Agriculture: Insights from Field Studies and Modeling Approaches” on “Considering water quality in approaches to optimize irrigation productivity”.

And finally, Dr Ben-Gal was invited to the 2020 International Conference of Drylands, Deserts and Desertification on 17th November and gave a talk about “Managing irrigation water as a function of its quality”.

Clearly there is ongoing interest in the impacts of irrigation water quality, which several SHui research groups are working on in specific cropping systems. Improving the salinity module of AquaCrop within SHui will help us to simulate the effects of water stress on our crops.

Negating the 8 hour time difference thanks to some creative scheduling by the conference organisers, Professor Ian Dodd (Lancaster Environment Centre) delivered a plenary lecture “Exploiting plant physiology for sustainable development” at the 30th Malaysian Society of Plant Physiology Conference to close the event for 17 November 2020. After considering some fundamental plant physiological mechanisms regulating plant water use, he considered the application of different irrigation techniques within the context of sustainable development. Taking advantage of the SHui slide deck made available to all project participants he explained the project’s ethos, and considered the difficulties of technology transfer within the context of partial rootzone drying (a theme of his recent webinar). The session concluded with several audience questions / observations about the use of PRD in different countries and alternate wetting & drying of rice in Malaysia.

On 8th – 9th October, SHui partners at CVUT joined the 6th international COSMOS Workshop in Heidelberg, Germany. Dr David Zumr et al presented ‘Foreseen potential of Cosmic Rays Neutron Sensing for better understanding of catchment runoff dynamic’. The recording of the presentation is available below. 

On 18th November, Dr. Diego Intrigliolo from CEBAS-CSIC will participate in the V Jornada Catedra AgroBank on Mediterranean agriculture and sustainable development goals. This online seminar will take place in Spanish.

Instead of congregating in “the frying pan of Europe” (aka Sevilla, Spain), several SHui researchers virtually attended the European Society of Agronomy’s biennial meeting (1 to 4 September 2020 -https://esa-congress-sevilla2020.es/ ). Delivered via Zoom, with a total of 270 participants, the technology mostly held up and allowed interactions that otherwise would have been cancelled due to covid-19.

Prof Elias Ferreres (UCO, IAS-CSIC) gave the opening plenary address on Sustainable water resource management. He focused on the relationships between water use and food production and the sustainability of water-limited agriculture, including topics such as crop productivity as affected by water, water management at different scales, agriculture-environment interactions, soil and water conservation, irrigation water management, deficit irrigation strategies, and efficient use of limited water supplies in drought situations.

Although relatively few SHui partners are growing soybean, and it is unlikely to be exposed to cold temperatures in Mediterranean regions, European soybean production is constrained by cold temperatures as the crop is often planted into cold soils, particularly in northern latitudes. Professor Ian Dodd (ULANC) presented some preliminary findings demonstrating the importance of plant hydraulics in regulating leaf expansion (vital for canopy establishment) and plant hormones in regulating leaf gas exchange when this crop is grown at 14 degrees Celsius.

Tomas Roquette Tenreiro (IAS-CSIC) presented a poster on the field work undertaken at Cordoba over this season, entitled “From point to field scale – uncertainties associated with the upscaling of modelling for field heterogeneity assessment”. This work is part of working package 2.1 experimental tasks, in which the group of Córdoba has been assessing the spatial heterogeneity of some local commercial cereal fields by combining field observations with spatial data and simulation trials with AquaCrop. The preliminary results reveal promising potential for the upscaling of different yield components simulation, such as plant biomass and the harvest index, seen as a possible strategy for distributing yield gap analysis through space and time.